Don't Panic: ISIS, Terror and Today's Middle East by Gwynne Dyer

Author:Gwynne Dyer [Dyer, Gwynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345815873
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2015-10-12T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

JIHAD: IRAQ AND SYRIA, 2010–2013

The untimely demise of AQI’s leader, Abu Ayyub al Masri, and of Abu Omar al Baghdadi, the titular head of the “Islamic State of Iraq,” in April 2010 was a turning point for the organization: it was only four years from that nadir of its fortunes to its conquest of most of the Sunni areas of Iraq in the summer of 2014. The person most closely associated with that turnaround is Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who succeeded to the leadership of the ISI in the following month at the age of thirty-nine. (The name al Qaeda in Iraq was dropped shortly afterwards, and the division between the two organizations, never more than titular, was erased.)

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi grew up in the small city of Samarra, a predominantly Sunni town. According to research done by the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and Germany’s ARD television channel, he was a mediocre student who had to repeat a year in school because his English was so bad, but he was a very good football player and a pious youth (the children to whom he gave Quran lessons called him “the believer”). He failed to gain admission to the law faculty of the University of Baghdad because of his poor marks, but the Islamic University of Baghdad accepted him into the theology faculty in 1991. He graduated eight years later with a PhD in Islamic theology, and he appears to have passed the remaining four years of Saddam’s rule as a junior cleric at a mosque in the Baghdad suburb of Tobchi.

The American invasion in 2003 galvanized him, and he promptly helped to found Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamaah (Army of the Followers of the Sunnah and the Community), a small “army” of militants who began launching attacks on U.S. troops, although, as the head of the Shari’ah committee, Baghdadi probably did not see combat. He was arrested by U.S. forces in February 2004 and imprisoned as a “civilian internee” at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq near the Kuwait border. American intelligence had little or nothing on him, however, and he was not seen as particularly dangerous—just another of the thousands of Iraqi men swept up in various raids and held without charge for looking suspicious. But it was probably his eleven months there that transformed him from an outraged Islamic scholar into a militant and ruthless terrorist leader.

Camp Bucca was a terrorist university. Jihadis who spent time there—and there are thousands of them—still refer to it as “The Academy.” Divided into about twenty separate compounds, it held 22,000 people at its peak, including Islamist militants, ex-Ba’athist bureaucrats and army officers who were suspected of being active in the resistance, and many confused people who had no idea why they were there. It was a pressure cooker where new links were forged and new ideas were explored. “We could never have got together like this in Baghdad,” said a senior officer in ISIS who was interviewed by Martin Chulov of the Guardian in 2014: “It would have been impossibly dangerous.

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