by Joby Warrick
One of the camp’s senior managers acknowledged that the Camp Bucca of Baghdadi’s time was both dysfunctional and, from the perspective of commanders looking to quell the Sunni insurgency, counterproductive. By corralling Islamist radicals and ordinary Iraqis in a lawless desert pen, U.S. officials inadvertently created a “jihadi university” that helped inculcate Islamist ideas into a new generation of fighters, the officer said.
“Extremists mingled with moderates in every compound,” Lieutenant Commander Vasilios Tasikas, who ran legal operations at the prison, wrote in a 2009 essay in the Military Review. “Unfortunately, U.S. forces had adopted a model of detention operations that assumed that those interned were ‘all bad guys’ to be ‘warehoused’ for an indeterminate amount of time and released randomly in arbitrary groups. This approach was not only naïve and myopic, it was also dangerous; predictably, it fueled the insurgency inside the wire.”
If Bucca was indeed a jihadi university, Baghdadi would ultimately become its greatest alumnus. Though hardly a tough guy, he found a way to survive and even thrive in prison. Baghdadi forged a number of important friendships and alliances, including one with a Zarqawi disciple called Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who became his chief deputy and spokesman years later. Moreover, the young Islamic scholar found that his academic expertise gave him a certain stature. The camp’s mini–Islamist society needed someone who could interpret Sharia rules, and on that score, Baghdadi was exceptionally qualified. He could lead the daily prayers, in which inmates in their identical yellow uniforms lined up by the thousands on their prayer mats to pledge fealty to Allah. He was also experienced at speaking and teaching classical Arabic, the form used in the Koran and in formal ceremonies and speeches. Baghdadi, having lived his entire life among clerics, could even mimic the singsong delivery of the most learned imams of the great mosques of Baghdad and Mosul. As a vessel, his voice was pleasant yet authoritative, and the men liked to listen to it.
They would not have many opportunities. The scholarly qualities that helped Baghdadi earn respect among fellow detainees also allowed him to gain an early release. Camp Bucca regularly discharged its less dangerous prisoners to alleviate severe overcrowding, a source of constant tension and occasional riots among the inmates. In late 2004, a prison panel reviewed the record for Ibrahim Awad al-Badri and decided that the bespectacled academic posed little threat. He was discharged on December 6, 2004, but not before a medical team took a cheek swab to preserve a record of his DNA. If the same man were to turn up anywhere, dead or alive, in connection with a future terrorist act, U.S. officials could be precisely sure of whom they had.
Baghdadi emerged from his ten-month exposure to U.S. forces with an even greater determination to fight them. Years later, his quest to defeat America became a prayerful refrain. “Deal with America and its allies, O Allah,” he would say in one of his public prayers. “Harshen your grip on them….Defeat them with the worst of defeats they will ever suffer. Divide their gatherings, split their body, dismember them completely, and make us raid them, and not them raid us.”
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For a time, Baghdadi would try to avoid further entanglements with Americans. He was married now, to the first of his three wives, and he was father to at least one child, a four-year-old son. He returned to school after prison and resumed his progress toward a doctorate in Islamic law, which he received in 2007. But the degree was not yet his when Baghdadi was drawn back into the insurgency. His old organization had merged with several others in the advisory council or shura created by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, and Baghdadi was asked to be one of the council’s advisers on matters concerning Sharia law.
A profile compiled by Western intelligence officials suggests that Zarqawi, a dabbler in theology who enjoyed debating with religious scholars, probably knew the man who would eventually replace him. But at the time, Baghdadi was still an obscure figure, even among the jihadists. “Zarqawi was closer than a brother to me, but I didn’t know Baghdadi. He was insignificant,” Ahmed al-Dabash, a contemporary and member of another militant faction, the Islamic Army of Iraq, told London’s Telegraph newspaper in 2014. “He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”
Zarqawi’s death in June 2006 changed everything. The heirs to the Jordanian’s al-Qaeda in Iraq movement had different ideas about how to run an insurgency, and they quickly reorganized themselves under a new name: the Islamic State of Iraq. Among the dominant leaders now were a number of former officers of Saddam Hussein’s vanquished army—Sunni colonels and majors who had allied themselves with Zarqawi but were never fully trusted by him. With the Jordanian gone, the former Baathists moved to assert Iraqi control over the group, from its central hierarchy to the provincial towns that were controlled by the Islamists in all but name. Once again, Baghdadi’s credentials made him uniquely valuable: Here was a bona fide Sharia expert with a solid Sunni-Iraqi pedigree who could ensure that the group’s scattered cells toed the line, ideologically. Baghdadi was quickly appointed chief of Sharia for a small farming town called al-Karma, just outside Fallujah. Soon afterward, he was placed in charge of religious affairs for all of Anbar Province. Then, in early 2010, he was appointed as the top Sharia official for the entire organization.
The promotion effectively made Baghdadi the third-ranking officer of the Islamic State, subordinate only to the senior leader and the minister of war. It’s the post he held on April 18, 2010, when U.S. missiles and Iraqi rockets flattened a safe house outside the city of Tikrit, eliminating the group’s number one and number two leaders in a single blow. At least for the moment, Baghdadi, the bookish academic dismissed by peers as “insignificant,” stood alone at the head of the Islamic State of Iraq.
A month would pass before Baghdadi’s emirship was made official. Despite his senior ranking, his move to the top of the organization was by no means guaranteed. Indeed, many Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials believed the job would go to a more seasoned figure with extensive experience commanding and leading operations. Yet, although Baghdadi was still a relative outsider, he won the support of the leadership council’s mix of former Baathists and Zarqawists.
Among those who approved of the promotion was a ruthless Iraqi army colonel named Samir al-Khlifawi, the leader of the group’s military council. A former Baathist who joined the insurgency after the U.S. invasion, Khlifawi urged Baghdadi to accept the top leadership and promised to serve as his top deputy and mentor, according to documents discovered years later, after Khlifawi’s death during fighting in Syria. The white-bearded Khlifawi, more commonly known by his jihadist name Haji Bakr, was regarded by intelligence analysts as a savvy strategist who was chiefly responsible for the Islamic State’s early military successes.
Despite his lack of military experience, Baghdadi offered certain advantages to the group. One was the Sharia scholar’s willingness to provide religious cover for acts of brutality that clerics around the world had condemned as un-Islamic. Everything that made the group so widely reviled—the beheadings, the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, the extortion, the war against Shiites, the spilling of so much innocent Muslim blood—Baghdadi not only endorsed, but declared legally justified under Islamic law.
His other great asset was his suitability for the role of caliph—symbolically important for an organization that wanted its “Islamic State” claims to be taken seriously. Baghdadi, with his genealogical and scholarly pedigrees, could aspire to heights of leadership beyond Zarqawi’s grasp.
Over the years that followed, Baghdadi worked deliberately to prepare himself for the mythical role to which he had been divinely appointed, according to a U.S. official familiar with Baghdadi’s history. “He cloaked himself with all the right religious credentials, and paid close attention to imagery, to clothing, to the way he moved and talked,” the official said. “He would go to great lengths to show that he was in his rightful place.”
It was in the service of that goal that Baghdadi dis
patched his emissaries across the border in August 2011, seeking a Syrian launchpad for the caliphate that still languished on the ground in his native country. A successful venture, in Baghdadi’s view, would help ensure the survival of his organization for years to come. More important, the Islamic State would be taking a first step toward erasing the artificial boundaries imposed by colonial powers to divide Muslims.
“We have crossed the boundaries that despicable hands demarcated between the Islamic states to thwart our movement,” Baghdadi would later say of his Syrian experiment. “This is the state for which Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi paved the way. It will not retreat in any shape or manner from the territory to which it has been extended.”
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Weeks had passed since Barack Obama and European leaders had delivered their call for Assad’s departure, and Assad was not taking heed. The Syrian’s response was to toss a few verbal barbs at the “colonialists” and turn up the violence against the protesters and the volunteer brigades that had sprung up to defend them.
At the White House, the splintering of the country was a subject of concern, but not yet alarm. The consensus among the president’s national security aides was that Assad would leave—eventually, according to two officials who attended high-level meetings on Syria that fall. By all appearances, the regime was in trouble, losing territory, soldiers, and even generals to a new rebel force called the Free Syrian Army. History itself was arrayed against Assad, and there was little the United States could or should do on its own to speed up the inevitable, the officials said.
“There was a sense that this thing would run its course, and we would do all we could to contain it,” said one senior official present at the discussions. “We really didn’t think it would drag on.”
But it did. As the conflict edged closer to full-scale civil war, the Obama administration grasped for a lever with which to nudge the sides toward a settlement. There was none to be found. When protests erupted in Egypt and Yemen, the United States had been able to call in old chits, IOUs that had piled up over decades of heavy U.S. economic and military support for the countries’ governments and security establishments. In Libya, the Obama administration secured critical legal and moral backing in the form of United Nations resolutions authorizing collective military action to protect civilians and support the rebels. But in the case of Syria, there was nothing like this: No military relationships, no economic aid, not even a significant trading partnership. At the United Nations, Syria’s longtime Russian ally blocked even the mildest resolutions criticizing Assad for killing his own people. When European countries voted to boycott the relatively meager imports of Syrian oil, Assad’s other major ally—Iran—more than offset the losses by supplying Syria with billions of dollars in bank loans and cash.
And so Assad stayed, month after month, erecting fortresslike defenses around the capital while seeking to wear down the rebels through the wholesale demolishing of neighborhoods by tank and artillery fire. Already, more than four thousand Syrians had died, including nearly three hundred children. Thousands more fled their homes, and those who stayed lived in darkened, ruined communities, desperately short of everything except rage and fear.
Publicly, the Americans pushed for concerted action against Assad at the United Nations and the Arab League. Behind the scenes, the White House worked with allies in seeking inducements that might persuade Assad to accept asylum and leave the country voluntarily. Unspoken altogether, except in the secure meeting rooms, was the acknowledgment that the conflict had at least one salutary effect: as long as it lasted, the uprising would serve as a financial and moral drain on the government of Iran, Assad’s most important ally.
One thing appeared certain: there was no appetite, even among the president’s most hawkish advisers, for another military entanglement in the Middle East. Even a minor engagement, such as air support or the supplying of arms to rebels, was problematic as long as Russia blocked a UN resolution needed to provide legal cover. The practical obstacles were just as formidable. Unlike Libya’s rebels, the Syrian opposition lacked a sanctuary from which it could organize and resupply in safety. And though the rebels had small arms, the Assad regime enjoyed a monopoly on the heavy weapons needed to tip the scales in the rebels’ favor. The Obama administration could offer humanitarian aid such as medical supplies, and some nonlethal gear, such as computers and cell phones. But those seeking to defend themselves against Assad’s forces would simply have to look elsewhere for rifles, armor, and ammunition. And beyond the reluctance to engage in another war in the Middle East, there were those on the U.S. team who felt arming the rebels would be pointless.
“The reality was, the opposition was not adequate to the task,” said the senior security official who participated in debates over action against Assad. “You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in 2011 who thought the moderates could prevail with enough arms. The truth is, they already had weapons. And it was clear to most of us that we should be pushing for a de-escalation, and not ramping things up even more.”
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One June afternoon in 2011, as Robert Ford was contemplating what the U.S. Embassy could do about surging violence in Hama, a small group of U.S. congressmen and staff members gathered in the Capitol basement for a private briefing about the events in Syria. Leading the discussion were three American citizens with an unusually keen interest in the fight over Syria’s future. The youngest, a twenty-seven-year-old Syrian immigrant, was also a veteran Capitol Hill staffer, well known to many in the room. For Mouaz Moustafa, it was a first introduction to a new job that would prove to be exhilarating and heartbreaking, often in the same day: enlisting American support for Syria’s embattled opposition.
For more than an hour, Moustafa and his colleagues answered questions from lawmakers who seemed genuinely concerned and eager to help. Moustafa, experienced at gauging the interest of elected officials in hearing rooms, felt encouraged.
“Everything was still early stages, and people in Congress really wanted to know what was going on,” he said, recalling the meeting. “They were asking good questions. We were hoping that they would be outraged.”
It was the first of many such visits for Moustafa, who seemed born for the part he was now playing. A Syrian-born resident of Hot Springs, Arkansas, he possessed communications skills in English and Arabic that had impressed his Capitol Hill bosses as well as influential figures within Washington’s small community of Middle Eastern political exiles. Now, in 2011, he stepped into the spotlight in an unexpected way, speaking directly to the American government many Syrians saw as their last resort. Working as a lobbyist for Assad’s opponents in a Syria he barely knew, Moustafa was among a handful of Washingtonians who would witness the unfolding calamity from both countries.
“It was that slow car crash where you’re trying to yell at the people at the wheel,” Moustafa said. “You just want to say, ‘Correct the course—just barely, just a bit. We don’t all have to die.’ ”
Moustafa was an ardent believer in American-style democracy, though his path to politics was indirect. The son of an airplane mechanic, he immigrated to the United States as an eleven-year-old whose only knowledge of English came from the Power Rangers children’s TV show. As an olive-skinned foreigner in his mostly white Arkansas grade school, he was teased mercilessly by other boys, until an adolescent growth spurt turned him into a lanky athlete with exceptional soccer skills. He was a star player through high school and college, and then, after graduation, landed unexpectedly in Washington as an intern for Arkansas Democratic representative Vic Snyder, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. He so impressed his boss that his summer gig turned into a staff position, first with Snyder and then with Arkansas’s second-term U.S. senator, Democrat Blanche Lincoln. After Lincoln’s defeat in 2010, he worked briefly as a TV journalist before being discovered by a group of Libyan opposition officials who were seeking a lobbyist fluent in both Arabic and the language of official Washing
ton. This was his job in April 2011, when Syrian exiles prevailed on him to work for them instead.
Soon Moustafa was briefing Congress and the White House as director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit that sought to provide real-time information about conditions inside Syria, as well as the thinking and plans of the anti-Assad opposition. So armed, U.S. policymakers could provide the kinds of assistance that would best help Syria’s rebels.
Or they could choose not to.
“The point was to convince people of something that already seemed logical,” Moustafa said. Americans are naturally sympathetic toward those who seek to liberate their country from dictatorship, and here U.S. democratic principles “had aligned with U.S. national interests, in terms of what we need to do in Syria,” he said. “And we just thought the policy would shift in that direction.”
Moustafa made regular trips to the White House to meet with senior members of the president’s Syria team, sometimes at his initiation but often at theirs. He sat through long West Wing briefing sessions with Samantha Power, Obama’s adviser on human rights who would later become ambassador to the United Nations, as well as Denis McDonough, the president’s tough-talking deputy national security adviser, and senior officials from the State Department’s Syria desk. All spoke sympathetically about the plight of Syria’s embattled opposition. But any talk about possible remedies came with a long list of caveats, legal provisos, and qualifiers.