relatively small, relatively unknown organization suddenly swept across much of northern Syria, ignoring the border with Iraq and moving to occupy a huge swath of territory of western and central Iraq including Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq.
The ISIS announcement that it was establishing a caliphate, with the now-occupied Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital, was shockingly sudden and unexpected. That announcement was one reason new recruits from outside of Iraq and Syria, even outside the Middle East, began joining ISIS in much larger numbers. But the US response was most concerned with developments in Iraq, where ISIS trampled the huge Washington-funded and Pentagon-trained military, whose soldiers and commanders mostly ran away, leaving their US weapons behind for ISIS to capture.
The immediate question was how ISIS was able to win what looked like such a lopsided battle. As Patrick Cockburn recounts in the preface to The Jihadis Return,
ISIS captured Iraq’s northern capital, Mosul, after three days of fighting. The Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which $41.6 billion had been spent in the three years since 2011, but this force melted away without significant resistance. Discarded uniforms and equipment were found strewn along the roads leading to Kurdistan and safety. The flight was led by commanding officers, some of whom changed into civilian clothes as they abandoned their men. Given that ISIS may have had as few as 1,300 fighters in its assault on Mosul, this was one of the great military debacles in history.
So how could ISIS win, even temporarily, against powerful militaries in Iraq and Syria? There are two answers. In Syria, it was the chaos of an exploding civil war, with the regime’s military stretched thin in some areas, and the anti-Assad opposition fighters – divided, poorly armed, and badly led – that allowed a better-armed, wealthier militia such as ISIS to move to a far more powerful position. There was simply too little opposition, and it was able to take over whole cities, such as its erstwhile capital, Raqqa, as well as sections of Aleppo and elsewhere, without serious opposition.
In Iraq, ISIS triumphed because it did not fight alone. It was able to take advantage of vital support from three components of Iraq’s Sunni community, support shaped by the increasingly repressive actions of the Shi’a-dominated sectarian government in Baghdad. They included Sunni tribal leaders, Sunni former military officers including Saddam Hussein-era Baathist generals, and ordinary Sunni communities who bore the brunt of the US-backed Baghdad government’s often brutal tactics.
The reason for the Sunni support for ISIS had less to do with what ISIS stands for – many Iraqi (and Syrian) Sunnis are profoundly secular, and most remained very much opposed to the brutality of ISIS – and far more to do with the disenfranchisement of Sunni communities under the rule of Shi’a-controlled governments in Baghdad. For many, the ongoing repression at the hands of their own government made an alliance with ISIS an acceptable, even preferable option – despite, rather than because of, its extremism.
From the beginning of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the large Sunni minority had been at the forefront of opposition. Sunnis had been privileged under the Baathist rule of Saddam Hussein and held positions of power inside the government, especially in the military. All those positions were lost as the US occupation dismantled the civil service and destroyed the Iraqi army. Both before and after the creation of ISIS and its forebears, Sunni militias, some linked to tribal organizations and often led by former generals, played a huge role in fighting the US and the new US-created government and security forces being established in Baghdad.
The US-created Sunni Awakening, paying off Sunni militias to fight for the US and its allies rather than against them, worked for a while – the intensity of the civil war diminished. But the repression aimed at Sunni communities across Iraq never really ended during the Awakening movement’s heyday, and when the US and Maliki stopped paying off the tribes, the repression escalated and Sunni opposition rose again.
Maliki’s government had become a major part of the problem of sectarianism in the country. As a consequence, Sunnis were far more likely to join with ISIS, seeing them as an armed force that would defend Sunni interests, or at least challenge some of the worst abuses of the Shi’a-led government. Despite the US having created the Iraqi government, and armed and funded it for more than a decade, by 2013 or so the Obama administration recognized that Maliki’s sectarianism had become a major strategic threat to US interests.
Washington campaigned hard to get Maliki replaced in the 2014 elections, and that finally happened – but the result was disappointing. The new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, was from Maliki’s same Shi’a political party, and while his rhetoric tended to favour a more unitary and less sectarian approach, the ministries responsible for most of the repression (intelligence and defense) remained essentially unchanged.
And so did the Sunni resistance. The various components of Sunni support enabled ISIS to increase its strength and capacity. Some of the tribal leaders provided militia fighters to fight alongside, if not actually with, ISIS. In February 2015, National Public Radio noted that while the Sunni tribes are mainly in western Iraq,
you can also find them in neighbouring Jordan. Sheik Ahmed Dabbash, speaking from his house on a sleepy street in the capital Amman, says his tribe fought side by side with al-Qaeda against the Americans a decade ago… Now Dabbash’s group is in a de facto alliance with ISIS. His views are typical of a broad spectrum of Sunnis in Iraq – Islamists, tribesmen, one-time supporters of Saddam Hussein. They feel victimized by Iraq’s Shi’a-led government and many fight against the Shi’a-dominated army – either by joining ISIS or allying with them, even if they find the group extreme.
Those ‘one-time supporters of Saddam Hussein’ include military leaders, who may or may not have actually supported the former Baathist leader but who played key roles in the powerful Iraqi military. Those officers are widely believed to be providing both training and strategic planning for ISIS military campaigns. According to the New York Times, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s ‘leadership team includes many officers from Saddam Hussein’s long-disbanded army. They include former Iraqi officers like Fadel al-Hayali, the top deputy for Iraq, who once served Mr Hussein as a lieutenant colonel, and Adnan al-Sweidawi, a former lieutenant colonel who now heads the group’s military council. The pedigree of its leadership, outlined by an Iraqi who has seen documents seized by the Iraqi military, as well as by American intelligence officials, helps explain its battlefield successes: Its leaders augmented traditional military skill with terrorist techniques refined through years of fighting American troops, while also having deep local knowledge and contacts. ISIS is in effect a hybrid of terrorists and an army.’
Even recognizing the Times’ sloppy use of the term ‘terrorist’ – whose multiple definitions all start with attacking civilians or non-combatants, not an occupying army – it is clear that the unexpected military capacity of ISIS is bound up with the military training of former army officials of the Saddam Hussein era.
It is equally clear that changing the balance of power on the ground and reducing ISIS’s power means severing the still-strong alliance between ISIS and Sunni communities and institutions. That will be difficult, perhaps impossible, as long as the US and its coalition continue large-scale bombing of ISIS targets in the midst of heavily populated Sunni cities, towns and regions, and as long as the Shi’a-led government in Baghdad continues its sectarian attacks on the Sunni community. The goal of winning Sunnis away from ISIS is undermined every time a US or Jordanian or British bomber or fighter-jet attacks Raqqa, for instance, or ‘in ISIS-controlled Fallujah’. Both of those cities, in Syria and in Iraq, are heavily populated, and the likelihood of civilian casualties is almost inevitable. When US bombs are dropped and US policymakers cheer, Sunni Iraqis see it as another betrayal.
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