by Joby Warrick
“They stole everything that was in my house before they blew it up,” said Suleiman, who moved to Jordan for safety. “It was my duty and honor to work with the Americans as a tribal leader fighting terrorism. But now it feels like we’ve been abandoned. We were left in the middle of the road.”
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On February 11, 2014, two of America’s top intelligence officials walked into a Senate hearing room to deliver what is traditionally one of the dreariest presentations of the congressional year: the catalogue of global woes known as the “Annual Threat Assessment.” This one would be exceptionally grim. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael Flynn, outlined emerging perils from a multitude of sources, including cyber-terrorism, a newly aggressive Russia, North Korean nuclear ambitions, global pandemics, and a potential calamitous unraveling of government authority throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Then, when the topic turned to Syria and ISIS, Flynn made a startling prediction.
“ISIL probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014,” Flynn said, using the federal government’s preferred acronym for the terrorist group in his testimony. Black flags were already flying over Fallujah, he said, and the takeover of that city would likely be repeated elsewhere, demonstrating the Islamists’ growing strength and “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens.”
Flynn used the careful language appropriate to a congressional hearing, but his private assessment of the situation was even more dire. He had gone up against the same terrorist organization a decade earlier, and he understood ISIS’s capabilities better than most.
A former chief of intelligence for General Stanley McChrystal, Flynn had helped lead the hunt for Zarqawi in Iraq. He recognized in ISIS the same familiar ideology and tactics. After the prison breaks the previous year, he even recognized many of the names.
“These are children of Zarqawi,” Flynn said. “We were able to capture many of the mid-to-high level commanders in the eighteen months after Zarqawi’s death. The majority were Iraqis, many of them former military guys who were put in the prison system. They’re all out now.”
But ISIS also was clearly learning and adapting, gaining new capabilities under Baghdadi’s oversight, Flynn explained. Baghdadi was a more careful planner, and he was willing to be both patient and strategic in building alliances and support networks. In short, ISIS’s recent gains in Iraq had been no accident.
“They got better because they saw how they were defeated,” Flynn said. “Zarqawi was trying to create a civil war immediately to turn the situation in Iraq to his advantage. But the one big mistake he made was that he did not gain enough favor with the tribes in Anbar Province. He stole authority from them and then really abused it, because he was a vicious guy. This new crowd realizes that and they’re operating differently.”
Slowly, Baghdadi had repaired relations with the Sunni tribes, Flynn said, echoing the assessment made by Zaydan and other tribesmen. The ISIS leader exploited Syria’s uprising to rebuild his finances while bringing in fresh recruits and a renewed sense of purpose. And he also had built an organizational structure made up of subject experts in fields as diverse as housing and transportation and strategic messaging.
“This current crowd, they are thinking long term,” Flynn said. “They see this as a generational effort.”
They were also on the move. Intelligence agencies were spotting unmistakable signs of mobilization for an ISIS offensive. But in which direction? Toward Baghdad, or Damascus?
U.S. intelligence agencies, watching the preparations under way by satellites and other remote systems, became convinced that ISIS was planning a push into the Iraqi heartland, and intended eventually to attack Baghdad itself. CIA analysts dutifully filed their reports, which made their way to the director’s office and then to the White House. Any ISIS force that crossed the border, the reports warned, would face a weakened Iraqi army that had fought poorly against insurgents in Fallujah and elsewhere. Just how weakened was hard to tell; after the last U.S. troops left the country, the Maliki government sharply curtailed cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies.
Yet no one imagined the Iraqi meltdown that would occur in the following weeks, acknowledged a senior intelligence official who watched the events unfold. “Though U.S. intelligence analysts provided ample warning about the ISF’s [Iraqi Security Force’s] troubles,” the official said, “it was difficult for anybody to foresee the rapid ISF collapse.”
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ISIS’s grand offensive began with an attack on its leader’s hometown. Just after midnight on June 5, 2014, raiding parties blew up a police station south of the city of Samarra, home to generations of Baghdadi’s al-Badri clan. Then, a few hours later, about 150 fighters roared into town on pickup trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns. The jihadists captured Samarra’s main municipal building and the city’s university, and then began to engage police who moved into defensive positions around the al-Askari Mosque, the ancient edifice whose iconic gold dome had been blown up by Zarqawi eight years earlier. The Iraqi army dispatched reinforcements from Baghdad, and the invaders soon pulled back, but already the fighting had spread to a half-dozen other towns along the highway that ran from Fallujah to the Syrian border.
Meanwhile, the main ISIS column, about fifteen hundred men, moved into position on the outskirts of Mosul. Protecting the ancient city and its 1.8 million people was an Iraqi force that on paper numbered twenty-five thousand. Its real strength was closer to ten thousand, the operational commander of Mosul’s Nineveh Province later acknowledged; the rest had dropped out through desertions or were simply no-show jobs on the police department’s payrolls, Lieutenant General Mahdi al-Gharawi told Reuters in the battle’s aftermath. The city’s remaining defenders were ill-supplied, since much of the defenders’ armor and heavy weapons had been ordered to the south, to help retake Ramadi and other Anbar Province towns during the January fighting.
“In my entire battalion we have one machine gun,” a Mosul battalion commander, Colonel Dhiyab Ahmed al-Assi al-Obeidi, told the news service. By contrast, when ISIS began pouring into his district before dawn on June 6, “in each pickup they had one,” he said.
A first column of invaders raced into the city’s northernmost Tammoz neighborhood in Humvees and pickup trucks, pouring machine-gun fire into the Iraqi army’s defensive front line. On cue, ISIS cells based inside the city also opened up with grenades and sniper fire. The defenders fell back; within hours, columns of ISIS trucks had advanced to within a few blocks of the Mosul Hotel, where Gharawi had set up his command center.
At 4:30 p.m. came the decisive blow. A large water truck packed with explosives barreled into the hotel, exploding in flames and killing or injuring many of the Iraqi force’s senior officers.
“The sound shook the whole of Mosul,” said Obeidi, whose leg was torn open by the blast.
The rest of the army’s defenses collapsed soon after that. By evening, police and army troops were discarding their uniforms and fleeing the battlefield in civilian clothes. Those who were caught were lined up in groups and shot.
By noon on June 10, just four days after the start of the offensive, the jihadists controlled Mosul’s airport and most of the town’s central district. They emptied the cash reserves from downtown banks and stripped an Iraqi military base of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-made weapons and equipment. Then they seized control of Mosul’s main prison, releasing the Sunni inmates and summarily executing the others—about 670 Shiites, Kurds, and Christians. By the end of the day, Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, was fully under ISIS’s control.
Iraq’s army eventually regrouped and launched a counteroffensive that stopped ISIS from advancing into Baghdad, even as ISIS continued to gain ground in other parts of the country. By late June, the terrorist group’s total land holdings, from western Syria to central Iraq, was greater than the areas of Israel a
nd Lebanon combined. The man who presided over this expanse now controlled more than just real estate. He owned oil wells, refineries, hospitals, universities, army bases, factories, and banks. Baghdadi’s holdings in cash and financial instruments alone approached half a billion dollars, analysts would later confirm.
There was as yet no real government in place. But in a very real sense, the Islamists now had their state.
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On July 4, 2014—a Friday, the Muslim day of prayer—Baghdadi appeared with bodyguards in the prayer hall of Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, famous for its “hunchback” minaret, which bows inward by several feet from the perpendicular. Local legend holds that the tower’s crooked shape was caused by the Prophet Muhammad himself, who passed overhead as he was ascending into heaven.
Those who attended services that day might have perceived a similar warping of the temporal order when the Islamic State’s chief officer walked to the front of the mosque to declare the restoration of the caliphate. ISIS had made a similar declaration a few days before, but now Baghdadi was making it official, from the minbar of one of Mosul’s most sacred sites.
The former Zarqawi disciple had clearly given much thought to his first public appearance, for he infused each moment with symbolic gestures sure to be recognized by the devout. Baghdadi wore a black robe and turban, evoking the dress of Allah’s last prophet on the day of his final sermon. He climbed the steps of the minbar slowly, pausing at each one to emulate another of Muhammad’s habits. At the top, as he waited to begin his sermon, he pulled from his pocket a miswak, a carved wooden stick used for oral hygiene, and began cleaning his teeth. Again the act deliberately invited comparison to Muhammad, who, according to an ancient Hadith saying, advised followers to “make a regular practice of miswak, for verily it is the purification for the mouth and a means of the pleasure of the Lord.”
He finally faced the audience to deliver a formal declaration of victory. The caliphate, sought by the movement’s leaders since Zarqawi’s time, was at last real.
“As for your mujahedin brothers, Allah has bestowed upon them the grace of victory and conquest, and enabled them, after many years of jihad, patience, and fighting the enemies of Allah, and granted them success and empowered them to achieve their goal,” he said. “Therefore, they hastened to declare the caliphate and place an imam, and this is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost for centuries and absent from the reality of the world.”
In the sermon, and in a separate audio address, Baghdadi claimed to be less than eager to accept what he called “this heavy responsibility.”
“I was placed as your caretaker, and I am not better than you,” he said.
Yet he decreed that faithful Muslims throughout the world were to obey him in all matters, as the head of the Islamic State and the guarantor of a new order that would soon become accepted reality for non-Muslims, whether they wished it or not.
“Know that today you are the defenders of the religion and the guards of the land of Islam,” he said. “You will face tribulation and epic battles. Verily, the best place for your blood to be spilled is on the path to liberate the Muslim prisoners imprisoned behind the walls of the idols.
“So prepare your arms, and supply yourselves with piety. Persevere in reciting the Koran with comprehension of its meanings and practice of its teachings,” Baghdadi said. “This is my advice to you. If you hold to it, you will conquer Rome and own the world.”
His sermon finished, Baghdadi, the self-ordained caliph, descended the minbar’s steps in the same cautious fashion. He stopped briefly to pray, then marched out of the mosque with his bodyguards, preparing to fight, and then, Allah willing, to rule.
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On the June day when Mosul fell, Abu Haytham sat in his office, fielding calls from harried deputies struggling to keep abreast of the events. In the corner, a small television with the sound muted replayed images of victorious ISIS fighters in an endless loop. Some waved and grinned from the backs of pickup trucks; others walked through Mosul’s main thoroughfares, past shuttered storefronts and burning police vehicles. Black banners fluttered from car antennas and makeshift flagpoles.
No one had foreseen such a rapid collapse of Iraq’s army, even here, at a spy agency that prided itself on avoiding surprises. As he stole glances at the silent screen, Abu Haytham’s eyes were bloodshot, and his big hands vigorously worked a set of prayer beads. This had been a stunningly quick turn of events. Yet the trajectory had been apparent for some time.
“Unfortunately, from the beginning, there has been this potential,” he said wearily.
He was a brigadier now, a senior officer in the counterterrorism division, where he had spent nearly three decades. Always a serious man, Abu Haytham had grown more somber with age, reflecting the heavier burdens he shouldered. His tidy office was free of adornment except for an ornate copy of the Koran and a photograph of a much younger version of himself, flashing a rare grin and shaking hands with the country’s king. An extra suit hung by the door for the days when the workload prevented him from making it home at all.
There were many such days now. The Mukhabarat had been on high alert since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, when the security service had played cat-and-mouse with arms smugglers and jihadi recruits trying to slip across the border. Now the jihadis themselves controlled the border posts on the other side. Jordan remained mostly quiet, for the moment, but there were worrying signs. In the southern town of Ma’an, an Islamist hotbed not far from the abandoned al-Jafr Prison, vandals sometimes spray-painted ISIS slogans on buildings or left black flags planted in the town square. There were no such displays in Amman, where the unraveling of the neighboring states was viewed with increasing dread.
Some Iraqis, particularly the descendants of the East Bank tribes, such as Zaydan al-Jabiri, had been willing to cut a deal with ISIS in order to free themselves from repressive Shiite rule. But the Islamists who seized control of Fallujah and Mosul turned out to be every bit as brutal as their Raqqa counterparts. Captured Iraqi soldiers were paraded before cameras and then gunned down in open pits. Suspected apostates were murdered in the streets, and priceless Babylonian artifacts—a source of cultural pride for generations of Iraqis—were smashed into powder. Such acts were welcomed by small numbers of religious conservatives whose views aligned with those of the Islamists. But among the Iraqis who had welcomed the Islamist guns, few were interested in Islamist rule. Now it was too late to rescind the invitation.
Abu Haytham, himself a son of the tribe, understood the resentments of Iraq’s Sunnis. And he was struck by how effectively ISIS exploited them.
“There’s a snowball effect here,” he said. “It begins with so many people being dissatisfied because they’re not represented within their government.”
Daesh, or ISIS, “knew exactly how to make use of these feelings, to benefit itself,” he said. “It has been going on now for twelve years, since the very beginning of the Iraq conflict, in 2003.”
And not just in Iraq. Already, self-proclaimed ISIS “wilayats,” or provinces, had announced themselves in countries beyond the group’s birthplace. Soon there would be new chapters in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In each case, the Islamists promised freedom from tyrannical regimes and the creation of a just society, ordered according to godly principles. What they delivered instead was an armed dictatorship defined by corruption, cruelty, and death.
There was nothing the Mukhabarat could do now to reverse that history, or alter the many mistakes and missteps that had led to this day. All that remained for the Jordanians was to strengthen their own defenses against a virulent strain that jumped the country’s borders years ago.
“Look how fruitful they have been,” Abu Haythan said, gesturing at the images on the screen. “We worked so hard to stop them. They sometimes get sick, but they never die.”
EPILOGUE
The spark that set Arab passions ablaze was
lit not in Iraq, as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had supposed, but in a rubble-strewn lot in eastern Syria. It happened on the cool, hazy morning of January 3, 2015, behind a bombed-out building in Raqqa, where the Islamic State’s media unit had set up video cameras and a small metal cage.
At least two dozen extras in identical masks and uniforms took their places, some forming a gauntlet and others pretending to guard. Finally, the video’s featured player was led in. Muath al-Kasasbeh, twenty-six, the Jordanian fighter pilot, now in a loose orange tunic and pants, his hands unshackled, walked unescorted through the mist-shrouded set as though wandering through his own dream.
The first image of al-Kasasbeh since his capture on December 24 depicted a young man whose face was swollen and bruised, evidence of a beating that had taken place sometime after he was seized. Before being led onto the film set, he was made to sit before a camera to tell his own story, or the parts of it that ISIS had wanted him to tell.
“I am First Lieutenant Muath Safi Yusef al-Kasasbeh, Jordanian, from Karak,” he began, “an officer in the Royal Jordanian Air Force.”
Al-Kasasbeh’s recorded account of his December 24 mission mostly followed the actual events. An F-16 pilot with nearly three years of experience, the Jordanian had been assigned to hit ISIS targets inside a grid of coordinates that included the city of Raqqa. His plane was part of an armada of Arab and Western aircraft that had been bombing ISIS since September 2014, when President Barack Obama launched an expanded air campaign in an attempt to drive the terrorist group from its safe havens in Iraq and Syria. Obama had ordered U.S. warplanes and drones into Iraq a few weeks earlier to halt an ISIS advance that threatened Iraq’s Mosul Dam and the Kurdish capital, Erbil. Then he announced a broader coalition that included aircraft from Jordan and five other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. “This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out [ISIS] wherever they exist,” Obama said in a televised speech.