Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  “I’m here to represent the Islamic State,” he said.

  Everyone in the room was floored, from the American visitors to the Christian and Muslim clerics who had unofficially presided over the town since the government forces pulled out.

  “It was shocking,” Moustafa said. “He was clean-shaven, maybe fifty, wearing a suit. We stopped in our tracks, because we didn’t even know how to carry on.”

  ISIS’s man at the meeting had little else to say, and appeared to be mostly listening and taking notes. At one point he interjected that his client tended to prefer Sharia law over secular legal codes.

  “We didn’t get into a discussion,” Moustafa said, “because we didn’t want him there.”

  The man eventually left, but his presence cast a pall. Here was evidence not only of ISIS’s presence in Syria, but also of the group’s intention to insinuate itself into governance at a microscopic level.

  For Moustafa, now two years into his job and more deeply engaged in Syria’s struggle than he could ever have imagined, it was another ominous turn. By early 2013, Moustafa had all but despaired of the possibility of a major U.S. intervention in the conflict. Now he spent most of his time looking for practical ways to improve the lives of Syrians in areas of the country outside Assad’s control. But for every forward step, there were steps back: infighting among rebel groups; widespread corruption, sometimes fueled by suitcases of cash from Arab governments; a growing sectarian divide that hampered cooperation and sometimes led to reprisal killings. Soon the ISIS problem—the presence of heavily armed extremists at war with everyone else, their replacement of existing courts and police departments with their own system of justice—would eclipse all others, further complicating the efforts by moderate rebels to win Western support for the opposition.

  Moustafa’s perspective on Syria’s unraveling now came at close range. He traveled to Syria constantly, often venturing within a few miles of the ever-changing front lines. He spoke and met regularly with rebel commanders, part of a growing personal network that also included journalists, international relief workers, foreign diplomats, and wealthy donors. After the U.S. Embassy in Damascus closed, Moustafa’s reports from Syria became a useful window into parts of the country the Americans could no longer monitor directly. When allegations surfaced that spring about a small-scale use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, Moustafa was asked if members of his network could help obtain blood and tissue samples for testing. They could, and did.

  In May 2013, Moustafa stood next to Senator John McCain when the Arizona Republican made a surprise visit to Syria to meet rebel commanders there. McCain was escorted through a rebel-controlled border crossing and then to a small building that served as a command center for the Free Syrian Army. There, he sat grim-faced as a dozen rebel commanders took turns complaining about Washington’s refusal to supply them with weapons, particularly antiaircraft missiles needed to stop Assad’s bombing of civilian enclaves. In lieu of the guns and bombs they needed, the militias were receiving surplus army rations—the ubiquitous MREs, or meals ready to eat, in their bland plastic packaging.

  “Am I supposed to throw pizzas at those airplanes?” one of the officers asked. Later, McCain would learn that all but two of the twelve officers he met had died in combat.

  “We need to have a game-changing action,” McCain told a TV interviewer after returning home. “No American boots on the ground, [but] establish a safe zone, and protect it and supply weapons to the right people in Syria who are fighting for obviously the things we believe in.”

  But at the White House, the president stood firm, insisting that shoveling more weapons into Syria would only make matters worse. “I don’t think anybody in the region…would think that U.S. unilateral actions, in and of themselves, would bring about a better outcome,” Obama told a news conference. The only trigger for a U.S. military response, he said, would be if Assad used chemical weapons, “something that the civilized world has recognized should be out of bounds.”

  There would be no help from Washington, Moustafa told his exasperated friends. The conflict, now in its second year, would continue as before, with the armies deadlocked while the suffering of civilians grew steadily worse. The biggest change was that risk of violent death now came from multiple sides at once. Two Syrians employed in the relief effort were captured by Assad’s forces and later killed. Then two other workers, both of them young men whom Moustafa knew well, disappeared after being stopped at an ISIS checkpoint. Task-force members later learned that the militants had found the workers’ laptops, confirming their employment with a Western relief organization. The two were executed, their bodies dumped into a pit.

  In late summer, the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons attack on civilians in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, briefly raised expectations of a Western military response. After U.S. intelligence agencies released evidence showing that Assad’s army had fired canisters of sarin gas into residential neighborhoods on August 21, Obama signaled his intention to punish Assad for crossing America’s one clear “red line.” Yet, despite widespread outrage over the deaths, the White House could not muster the political support for a military strike. Congress blocked a vote on a resolution authorizing air strikes against Assad, and the Parliament in Britain—a country presumed to be a key ally in any military campaign—rejected a similar proposal by Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory government. President Obama managed to secure a deal, with Russia’s help, to remove all chemical weapons from Syrian territory, and the prospect of military intervention was again pushed aside.

  Among Syria’s opposition leaders, the collapse, in their view, of Western resolve after the Ghouta attack was a tougher psychological blow than the chemical attacks themselves, Moustafa said. Some rebel groups that had previously aligned themselves with the moderate Free Syrian Army simply gave up and joined the Islamists, who at least paid better salaries.

  “People had been ecstatic when they believed the U.S. was finally going to act,” Moustafa said. “It was one of those moments when everyone remembers exactly where they were. The regime was scared. We were hearing reports of people fleeing Damascus. Even the idea of bombs falling didn’t cause concern. It was, like, ‘Thank God. Even if we die in the bombings, at least now things will change.’

  “And then, when nothing happened—that was the end,” he said. “There was no more hope after that.”

  —

  Washington’s disarray over the chemical strikes looked even worse from the inside. Syria’s “wicked problem,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously called it, had split the National Security Council and was now creating casualties among the president’s senior advisers.

  Frederic C. Hof, the senior diplomat who helped coordinate the administration’s response to Syria, resigned in frustration in late 2012. Now Robert S. Ford, the exiled ambassador to Damascus, was beginning to consider quitting.

  Ford had been waging a fruitless battle inside the administration, pushing for concrete measures to strengthen the moderate opposition as a counterweight to the Islamists, who were controlling about a quarter of Syria’s territory, including border crossings into Iraq and Turkey. He had supported air strikes after Assad’s chemical attack on Ghouta in August 2013, and when those failed to materialize, he pushed for direct support to well-known and carefully vetted moderate militias.

  “Increase the assistance. Do more,” he urged. Despite White House promises, after the chemical attack, to speed up CIA training for rebels in Jordan and southern Turkey, the effort was too small and too slow to make a difference. “We really aren’t doing anything,” he said.

  Making matters worse, Ford was being regularly summoned to Capitol Hill to defend the administration’s policies in congressional hearings. Sensing a political opportunity, Republicans hurled insults at Ford in televised hearings, seeking to make the diplomat a symbol for White House ineptitude in managing the crisis. At one hearing, McCain questioned Ford’s grasp of the Syrian cri
sis and suggested that the diplomat was willing to accept Assad’s continued butchery of his own people.

  “It seems like that is a satisfactory outcome to you,” McCain said.

  Ford kept calm, but inside he was furious.

  “Do I need this?” he thought.

  The reality, as Ford understood it, was that Congress was just as divided over what to do as the administration. Hawks such as McCain wanted to arm the rebels, but other Republicans favored military support only for groups that were fighting ISIS. Still other lawmakers—Republicans and Democrats—were leery of any U.S. involvement, reflecting an opinion held by large majorities of the American electorate.

  Ford was ready to quit by the fall of 2013, though he was persuaded by State Department colleagues to stay on for another six months. When he finally turned in his resignation letter in early 2014, no one tried to stop him. By then, his efforts within the administration seemed to him increasingly futile, and the highly partisan, highly personalized attacks from Congress had drained his resolve to continue trying.

  “I don’t mind fighting, but when my integrity is being challenged by people who don’t even know what’s going on—it’s ridiculous,” he said.

  Ford’s resignation was officially announced on February 28, 2014. Days later, McCain asked the ambassador to stop by his office so he could personally thank him for his service.

  Ford considered the request for a moment, then politely relayed his reply: “No.”

  22

  “This is a tribal revolution”

  In the decade since the group’s founding, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s jihadist followers had been called terrorists, insurgents, and Islamist militants. Now they were a full-fledged army. In the late spring of 2014, the troops of the Islamic State surged across western Iraq and into the consciousness of millions of people around the world. Moving with remarkable speed, ISIS vanquished four Iraqi army divisions, overran at least a half-dozen military installations, including western Iraq’s largest, and seized control of nearly a third of Iraq’s territory.

  Analysts and pundits described the ISIS blitz as sudden and surprising, a fierce desert storm that appeared out of thin air. But it was hardly that. The ISIS conquest of June 2014 was a carefully planned, well-telegraphed act, aided substantially by Iraqis who had no part in ISIS and no interest in living under Sharia law. In the end, the movement’s greatest military success was less a statement of ISIS’s prowess than a reflection of the same deep divides that had roiled Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

  At the root of the spring’s dramatic events was a conflict between Iraq’s Shiite government and one Sunni tribe, the Dulaims. It happened to be the familial clan of Zaydan al-Jabiri, the Ramadi sheikh and rancher who had been caught up in the fight against Zarqawi nearly a decade earlier. Zaydan had first watched his fellow tribesmen take up arms against the Americans in 2004, amid soaring anger over the occupation. He had then been a key participant in the anti-Zarqawi backlash known as the Anbar Awakening, when tribal militias helped drive insurgents out of their villages. Now the currents had shifted again, and Zaydan would watch with approval as his entire tribe rose up against an Iraqi government that many Dulaims saw as a greater threat than Zarqawi had ever been.

  Zaydan was now fifty, thicker around the middle, but with the same mane of black hair, a successful businessman who wore a tailored suit as comfortably as the dishdasha and keffiyeh he wore to more traditional engagements. He had three wives, and a brick house that could have been plucked out of a tony subdivision in suburban San Diego. But beginning around 2010, Zaydan had come to view Iraq’s government as at war with Sunnis like himself. The country’s minority Sunnis had ruled Iraq up until the U.S. invasion, when power was handed to Shiites. Now, with American troops out of the way, the score settling had begun in earnest, or so it seemed to the Dulaims. It was objectively true that Sunnis had lost positions of power in the government and armed services, and there were numerous documented cases in which Shiite conscripts had brutalized Sunnis in their homes in the guise of rooting out terrorism. In Zaydan’s mind, it was all part of an Iranian-inspired plan to ensure that Iraq never again posed a threat to Tehran’s interests in the region.

  “The ones who are leading now were thieves, bandits, and sectarian religious parties,” Zaydan said, referring to the cohort in power since Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s narrow election in 2010. “Even with all the bad things the Americans did in Anbar, they didn’t kill people in mosques, and they respected our religion. Those who are with the Iranians do not. They want to get rid of everything called ‘Sunni.’ I’m not saying the Americans were great, but they were better than these.”

  Then, beginning in late 2012, Sunni relations with the central government turned sharply worse. On December 21, government security forces raided the home of Rafi al-Issawi, a popular Sunni politician and a former Iraqi finance minister who had been outspoken in his criticism of the Maliki government. Thousands of Dulaims took to the streets in Fallujah, some of them carrying banners that read “Resistance Is Still in Our Veins.” The rally eventually grew into a weekly pan-Sunni protest that spread to multiple cities and continued for month after month.

  After more than a year of such protests, Maliki had finally had enough. On December 30, 2013, he sent security forces into Ramadi to shut down the demonstrations and break up a tent city that had sprouted in one of the city’s plazas. Clashes broke out, and on New Year’s Day 2014, protesters set fire to four Ramadi police stations. On January 2, rioting spread to neighboring Fallujah. On January 3, a convoy of armed ISIS militants rolled into town. The jihadists joined tribal militias in street battles with outmatched police and troops, inflicting more than one hundred casualties. Finally, on January 4, the remnants of Fallujah’s government evacuated the town, and Islamic fighters raised the black flag of ISIS over the city’s administration building.

  The Dulaimi-ISIS alliance quickly drew support from other Sunni tribes as well as from a shadowy organization of former Baathists known as the Naqshbandi Order. The Sunni pact waged seesaw battles with army troops for several weeks for control of Ramadi and five other cities, but an uneasy truce settled over Fallujah, with ISIS firmly in charge of the center of town. It was the first time the terrorist group could officially claim an Iraqi city as its own.

  ISIS seized the moment to fire off a stream of propaganda images on Twitter, showing its victorious troops parading around the center of the same city from which U.S. marines had ousted Zarqawi’s men a decade earlier. Among the fighters posing for photographs was Abu Wahib al-Dulaimi, the flamboyant, publicity-obsessed ISIS commander for Anbar Province who had shot the three Syrian truck drivers on an Anbar highway the previous spring. In one frame, he grimaces, rifle in hand, next to a burning police car, wearing a black overcoat and boots like a Western gunslinger. In another, he walks through one of the captured police stations carrying a stack of files, like some kind of doomsday office clerk. Iraqis who saw the images might have noticed the familiar last name: Abu Wahib’s surname identifies him as a member of the Dulaim tribe, making him a kinsman to the men who had organized the Fallujah protests. Enemies before, they were now officially on the same side.

  At the White House, President Obama’s security advisers viewed the same images with dismay. Administration officials quickly announced plans to speed up the delivery of promised military aid to the Maliki government, including new Hellfire missiles. Security for Iraqis was Maliki’s problem now—he had insisted on it—but a terrorist takeover of an Iraqi city could not be allowed to stand.

  To Zaydan, however, as for many other Sunnis, the revolt was purely an internal affair, one the Americans and the Baghdad government had completely misread, again.

  “This is a tribal revolution,” Ali Hatim al-Suleiman, the leader of the Dulaim tribe, told the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.

  “Iraqi spring,” explained Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni politician and friend of the U.S. amb
assador to Syria, Robert Ford, speaking from exile in Turkey after Maliki tried to arrest him.

  The Sunnis candidly acknowledged that the tribes had handed ISIS the keys to Anbar Province, but only as a temporary measure. ISIS was merely providing the additional firepower needed to help Sunnis assert long-sought independence from Iraq’s abusive central government, they said. Besides, these jihadists were Sunni patriots, not the death-obsessed criminals who had run the organization during Zarqawi’s time.

  “They changed,” Zaydan said of the group. “Their leadership became Iraqi, and their program changed completely. The government claims that Baghdadi is a terrorist, but he’s not a terrorist. He’s defending fifteen million Sunnis. He’s leading the battle against the Persians.”

  It was true that Zarqawi also had gotten a pass when he burst into Anbar Province with his small band of Sunni militants after the U.S. invasion. Zarqawi also had been a man of the tribe, but a different tribe. Baghdadi, by contrast, was a true Iraqi, raised in Samarra, Zaydan noted. He could be controlled.

  “He will not dare talk about Sharia here, because he knows the tribes will not tolerate it,” Zaydan said. “These people learned their lesson. They won’t try the same things they did last time.”

  In fact, ISIS already was moving to settle scores in Anbar neighborhoods that had welcomed the group’s arrival. Abdalrazzaq al-Suleiman, a Sunni tribal sheikh and one of Zaydan’s Ramadi neighbors, happened to be away on business when a truck filled with black-clad fighters drove up to his farm. The jihadists shot several of Suleiman’s bodyguards, destroyed his cars, and then leveled his house with explosive charges. Suleiman’s offense: Eight years earlier he had been a leader of the Anbar Awakening movement that cooperated with U.S. troops in driving Zarqawi’s followers out of the province.