Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

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  On April 9, 2013, Baghdadi posted a twenty-one-minute audio message on Islamist Web sites, announcing a major corporate restructuring. Officially banished, Baghdadi said, was the group known as the al-Nusra Front. In its place was a newly merged organization that Baghdadi called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The latter word, roughly synonymous with the English term “Levant,” referred to the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, from southern Turkey through present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. English-speakers would know the new organization as ISIL, or ISIS.

  In explaining the change, Baghdadi recounted a history of the group’s previous incarnations, starting with the early days under Zarqawi, the founder and esteemed “mujahid sheikh.” He told a story of how Zarqawi, when he first swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, explained privately to his followers that he did so for strategic reasons, and not out of some genuine devotion or need.

  “I swear by Allah, I didn’t need from him money or weapons or men, but I saw in him a symbol,” Baghdadi quoted Zarqawi as saying. Now, in a similar vein, it had become strategically important for the Syrian offshoot organization to unite symbolically with its parent, he said.

  “Al-Nusra Front was only an expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq, and part of it,” Baghdadi said. “So we declare, keeping our trust in Allah, the abolishing of the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the abolishing of the name of al-Nusra Front, and joining them under one name—the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham—and also uniting the banner, which is the banner of the Islamic State.”

  The message cut a fresh trough of despair across Western capitals. Analysts had long assumed that the al-Nusra Front was an Islamic State offshoot, though one that had at least temporarily decided to soften its image. Now Baghdadi was asserting publicly that the two organizations were one and the same. Moreover, the more fearsome Iraqi side was taking charge.

  But the most emphatic response came from a surprising source: Baghdadi’s presumed partner in the merger. No one had bothered to secure the consent of the al-Nusra Front, which, as it turned out, had no intention of fading away. The al-Nusra leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, fired back two days later with an audiotaped message repudiating everything Baghdadi had said. “Al-Nusra Front’s banner will remain, nothing will be changed in it,” said Baghdadi’s old comrade and former friend.

  Julani then appealed to the world’s preeminent jihadist, al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to settle the dispute. The longtime deputy of Osama bin Laden had famously quarreled with Zarqawi over beheadings and other shock-theater tactics, and the old Egyptian had been equally unhappy with Zarqawi’s successors. On June 9, 2013, Zawahiri published an open letter, ordering a halt to the merger and scolding Baghdadi for attempting such a thing without consulting with him first. In an astonishing rebuke, he decreed that Baghdadi would be on probation for a year as leader of the Islamic State of Iraq. After twelve months, Zawahiri would decide to either allow him to stay on the job or “appoint a new emir,” the letter said.

  Finally, to ensure that no fighting erupted between the groups, Zawahiri said he was sending a personal emissary, an al-Qaeda elder statesman named Abu Khalid al-Suri, into Syria to mediate any future disputes. “Muslim blood is off-limits for other Muslims,” Zawahiri declared.

  “I call upon all my Muslim brothers and the Mujahedin to stop arguing over this dispute and to stop sedition among the Mujahedin,” he wrote, “and to seek harmony and unity, along with winning hearts and uniting ranks among Muslims.”

  It was a remarkable, and strikingly public, feud between branches of the al-Qaeda network, one that not only contained echoes of the dispute between Zarqawi and Bin Laden but also evoked the earlier rift between Zarqawi and his one-time mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. The squabbling continued to play out for months, with Islamist scholars and pundits around the world taking sides in Internet forums and chat rooms, arguing over which leader best represented the movement’s future.

  Baghdadi dealt with al-Qaeda’s advice just as Zarqawi did: he ignored it. He issued one additional statement, claiming that he was merely following orders from a higher authority. “I prefer the command of Allah over the command that contravenes it,” he said. And then he proceeded to launch his unified Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham as though the al-Nusra Front did not exist.

  Throughout 2013, bands of ISIS fighters would fan out across nearly every part of Syria, from the lawless eastern desert to the populated corridors along the Turkish and Jordanian borders and to the very suburbs of Damascus. But before the assault began in earnest, Baghdadi had a few matters of business to attend to inside Iraq.

  He first commenced an organizational overhaul, appointing regional governors, Sharia advisers, and military commanders to oversee operations locally throughout Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State would function like a real government, with flow charts for acquiring approvals and special departments in charge of social media, logistics, finances, training, recruitment, and even the management of candidates for suicide missions, who were kept apart from the regular fighters to ensure proper indoctrination.

  Next, Baghdadi would crank up the violence inside Iraq, unleashing waves of bombings that set a new mark for the gratuitous slaughter of ordinary civilians. The body count in Iraq’s morgues soon soared to levels not seen since the Zarqawi era, as ISIS dispatched suicide bombers into sports arenas and community soccer games as well as mosques, cafés, and markets. Even Iraqis inured to bloodshed expressed shock when an ISIS recruit drove an explosives-laden truck into an elementary-school playground in Nineveh Province in October 2013, killing thirteen children who were outside for recess.

  The final step was an operation Baghdadi called “Destroying the Gates.” It started with a trial run in 2012, when his fighters crashed into a small prison near the Iraqi city of Tikrit and freed a hundred prisoners, half of them former terrorists who had been on death row. Then, on July 21, 2013, ISIS struck two of the country’s largest prisons in simultaneous nighttime raids that involved multiple suicide bombers and scores of mortar rounds. The biggest of the two raids, on Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, freed more than five hundred inmates, many of them veterans of Zarqawi’s terrorist network.

  Now Baghdadi had the core elements he needed for his reinvigorated ISIS army. Already, some of his fighters were moving to take control of small villages and towns in northern and eastern Syria, and now they would be joined by battle-hardened, ideologically disciplined fighters straight from Iraq’s worst prisons. Some of the towns they entered were already under the control of other rebel militias, including the al-Nusra Front. When it encountered such forces, ISIS would offer a choice: join, flee, or fight. If the local force resisted, the Iraqis would not hesitate to kill them.

  The rift with the al-Nusra Front slowly widened into a chasm. Zawahiri’s personal peacemaker, Abu Khalid al-Suri, remained in Syria for a time, still hoping to find a way to end the dispute. In early 2014, he was bunking at the headquarters of an Islamist militia in the northern city of Aleppo when five men charged into the building with guns blazing. One of the assailants squeezed the trigger of his suicide vest, killing al-Suri and six others.

  No one took credit for the mission, but al-Qaeda refused to have anything to do with ISIS after that. It urged its followers for the first time not only to stay away, but to oppose Islamic State’s endeavors actively. By then it hardly mattered. Baghdadi now controlled the best-armed, most experienced fighters in the Syrian opposition. And they were about to become stronger still.

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  Syria’s eastern provincial capital, Raqqa, is a shabby river town with a long history of being overrun by foreign invaders. The Greeks were first, followed by Romans, Persians, Mongols, and Ottomans, among others. Then it was the jihadists’ turn. From midspring to the early summer of 2013, a succession of ISIS convoys rolled into the city in their white pickups, gradually kicking out the last of the Free Syrian Army defenders and setting up the
terrorist group’s official Syrian headquarters. Raqqa’s 220,000 citizens would become the first urban population to experience life in a city fully under the control of the Islamic State.

  The newcomers moved quickly, once the city was secure, to establish the new order. A huge ISIS banner was draped around the clock tower in al-Jalaa Square—renamed Freedom Square—and the city’s new rulers began promulgating lists of behaviors that would no longer be tolerated.

  Secretly snapping photos of ISIS’s edicts was a brave young man who called himself Abu Ibrahim. Together with a pair of accomplices, he faithfully documented Raqqa’s transformation over the next eighteen months, in photographs and video recordings he would take surreptitiously and post to the Web so all the world could see.

  Abu Ibrahim vividly remembered ISIS’s triumphant entry into the city. The prelude was a week of heavy street fighting that left scores of bodies lying in the streets and most of the city’s civilians trapped in their houses, afraid to venture out for fear of being hit by sniper fire. Stores and bakeries closed, and many families ran out of food. “If you had bread, it was like having a million dollars,” he recalled. “These were the hardest days.” The fighting gradually waned, as militiamen opposed to ISIS either fled or switched sides. Then, all at once, columns of foreign fighters—mostly Iraqis, Abu Ibrahim later learned—appeared in the streets. ISIS’s men raised their black flags over the main government buildings and claimed Raqqa as the new capital of the Islamic State.

  “They walked around with their weapons, saying everything was going to be good now,” he said. “They even began removing the bodies that had been lying around in the streets.”

  Many in Raqqa initially did not know what to make of the newcomers, Abu Ibrahim said. Some were relieved at least to see the fighting come to an end. Shops reopened and the city began to feel safe again.

  But then the executions started.

  The first one witnessed by Abu Ibrahaim involved a young man that ISIS commanders described as a criminal, though the man’s offense was never made clear. The condemned man was forced to stand in Raqqa’s main plaza, where his sentence was publicly read. Then he was shot in the head as a small crowd looked on. Next, ISIS soldiers tied the corpse’s arms to a plank, crucifixion style, and left it to rot in the square for three days.

  A second crucifixion followed a few days later. Then came a group execution, in which ISIS soldiers killed seven men and teens in the same square. Some appeared to be stragglers from defeated rival militias, though several were smooth-faced boys. This time the soldiers cut the heads from the corpses and displayed them on fence posts outside a city park.

  “People were frightened, which is what they wanted,” Abu Ibrahim said. “They wanted everyone to be terrified of them.”

  Having thus announced themselves to the city, Raqqa’s new overseers began moving to eliminate obvious challenges to their authority. The city’s three churches were padlocked, and crosses and other Christian symbols were hacked down or covered up. A Shiite mosque with an elegant turquoise dome was blown to pieces. Cigarettes and alcohol—symbols of Western corruption—were dumped into piles and burned. Then ISIS moved to create symbols of its own, starting with a converted police station that was painted black, from top to bottom, and repurposed as an administration building and Sharia court that would decide matters of crime and punishment. Suddenly Raqqa citizens were subject to a bewildering array of new regulations, enforced by the ISIS-appointed Hisbah, or religious police, who were free to interpret the laws as they saw fit.

  The city’s new rules began with mandatory religious observances—all shopkeepers were required to close for daily prayers, for instance—and expanded to include personal dress and behavior. ISIS banned not only smoking and drinking but also Western music and displays of Western clothing in shop windows. Women could leave their houses only if fully covered, and even then, any outing risked a humiliating inspection by police to ensure that the woman’s abaya was sufficiently opaque and loose fitting, to avoid revealing any hint of the wearer’s physical form.

  Punishment for violating ISIS’s rules could range from a public scolding or fine to floggings and worse. One unmarried couple was beaten for sitting together on a park bench. Another man was publicly flogged because he married a divorced woman before the mandatory three-month waiting period had ended. Any infraction carried an implicit threat of summary execution, which at times seemed to be carried out almost on a whim, Abu Ibrahim said.

  “Sometimes a week or two will go by with no executions, and then suddenly there will be five at once,” he said. “For ordinary people, there are fines and fees for everything: for running a business, for parking your car, for picking up your trash. They take your money and they use it to pay the salaries of the foreign fighters. And people are afraid to do anything because of the risk of execution.”

  But most troubling to Abu Ibrahim was how Raqqa’s occupiers treated the city’s children. Schools were kept shuttered for months after ISIS seized power, and when they finally reopened, everything had changed. The old textbooks and curricula—the “books of the infidels,” ISIS called them—had been tossed out, replaced by religious training. Meanwhile, the city’s hundreds of orphaned children and teens were moved to military camps to learn to shoot rifles and drive suicide trucks. Abu Ibrahim would sometimes see the young ISIS recruits in military convoys, carrying guns and wearing oversized uniforms.

  “Some are boys younger than sixteen,” he said. “When the schools were closed there was nothing for them to do. They see these tough guys with their Kalashnikovs and it affects them. They want to be part of it.”

  Indeed, ISIS would frequently boast about its youth camps, offering virtual tours on social media of facilities with names such as “al-Zarqawi Camp.” Photographs and videos posted to Twitter showed prepubescent boys in military garb, firing weapons and practicing maneuvers. Other images depicted young trainees being directed to execute prisoners with gunshots to the head.

  To Abu Ibrahim, the camps were ISIS’s attempt at ensuring the movement’s survival and hedging against the possibility of future military setbacks. The organization was investing in the creation of cadres of fanatical young followers willing to kill others or sacrifice their own lives if ordered to do so. “They are being brainwashed,” Abu Ibrahim said of the ISIS youths, “to create an army of loyal followers for the future.”

  Meanwhile, ISIS was doing fine with the army it already had. A few months after announcing its entry into Syria, the Islamic State’s ranks had swollen to nearly ten thousand fighters, including the bulk of the foreign volunteers streaming into Syria from fifty countries around the world. Rival rebel groups, from the al-Nusra Front to the secular Free Syrian Army, complained that ISIS was winning the competition for recruits—not just because it could afford to pay bigger salaries, but also because it claimed to be fighting for something bigger than Syria.

  The group’s Twitter and Facebook pages featured daily testimonials from volunteers from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East touting the many rewards of jihad, both heavenly and temporal. An August 2013 Twitter posting by a Syrian jihadist who called himself Nasruddin al-Shami said he felt he had joined a “global gathering” when he signed up for ISIS. “I chose to be a soldier under this banner, because I found it to be Arab and non-Arab,” he wrote. “I found people from the Peninsula, the Islamic Maghreb, the Egyptians, and the Iraqis. I met people from the Levant and Turkey. I met French, British, and Pakistanis. The list is long. They were all beloved brothers whose concern is to support the religion.”

  A British ISIS recruit told a British broadcaster, “It’s actually quite fun.

  “What’s that [video] game called—‘Call of Duty’?—It’s like that,” he said, “but really, you know, 3-D. You can see everything’s happening in front of you. It’s real. You know what I mean?”

  In Raqqa’s downtown markets, bearded, rifle-toting foreigners seemed at times to outnumber locals as the ISIS o
ccupation took on a look of permanence. The group’s coffers were fattening quickly, between the fees and bribes assessed to businesses and the sale of more than forty thousand barrels of crude oil per day from oil wells captured by ISIS in its march across the Syrian desert. The jihadists who had been so anxious to capture Raqqa a few months earlier seemed in no hurry now to push on to further conquests, Abu Ibrahim noted. The Islamic State’s men would turn aggressive whenever there were punishments to mete out, but between executions and floggings, Abu Ibrahim would see them relaxing in restaurants, gawking at Western Web sites in Internet cafés, or buying knockoff Viagra from the drugstores.

  For the occupiers, the Islamic State had finally arrived, at least in miniature. The men with the guns seemed happy with the state of affairs, because they were running the place. For everyone else in Raqqa, Abu Ibrahim wrote, all that was left was the “culture of backwardness and terror, after extinguishing the light of the mind.”

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  In April 2013, as Baghdadi was preparing to announce his restructuring, Mouaz Moustafa slipped into the country, as he had done many times, through a hole in the chain-link border fence of Hatay Province in southern Turkey. He moved easily—this corner of far-northern Syria had been liberated from Assad for nearly a year—and made his way by foot to Khirbet al-Joz, a farming village that had become a kind of in-country base for his Syrian Emergency Task Force. The former congressional aide and his team had made a project of restoring basic services in the town, still scarred by months of fighting and looting. After helping reestablish the police department, he had returned to meet with locals interested in setting up a magistrate’s office to settle minor disputes. He never dreamed who else would show up.

  At the meeting was a well-dressed lawyer who introduced himself as Muhammad. The man explained that he was representing a client with an interest in the administration of justice in post-Assad Syria. Pressed, he identified the group that had hired him.