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.
Because of the US military campaign, the claimed US goal of making new deals with Sunni tribes and winning over broader Sunni community support for the anti-ISIS struggle remains impossible to achieve. As NPR reported in February 2015, the ‘US view on how to defeat ISIS involves making a deal with Sunnis like [tribal leader] Dabbash, and even incorporating their men into a sort of Iraqi National Guard. “The Guard is a breakthrough idea, because it will ensure that Iraqis are protected by people with whom they are familiar and in whom they have trust. It’ll break down some of the sectarian divide,” said US Secretary of State John Kerry. But that trust is sorely lacking among Dabbash and other Sunni leaders who have yet to show signs that they are ready to make a truce with the government in Baghdad.’
As long as they can count on support – or even lack of opposition – from Iraq’s Sunni tribes, and as long as the multi-party civil war continues to rage across Syria, ISIS is likely to maintain its power at a level vastly disproportionate to its size.
There is a long history of foreign militants or wannabe militants travelling to the greater Middle East region to join Islamist campaigns. Perhaps the best known in recent years is the massive influx of foreign fighters who travelled to Afghanistan throughout the 1980s to join the indigenous mujahideen, or holy warriors, fighting against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. One of the most famous of these was Osama bin Laden. The mujahideen were armed by the CIA, paid by Saudi Arabia, trained by CIA allies in Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, and welcomed at the White House by President Ronald Reagan, who called them ‘freedom fighters’.
More recently, foreign fighters travelled to Iraq to join various militias – including extremist Islamist groups, some of them linked to al-Qaeda – to fight against the US occupation. But the numbers were never enough to have a determinative impact on the military balance of power.
From the first months of the Syrian civil war, foreign activists arrived to support the anti-Assad opposition. As the initial nonviolent political campaign morphed into devastating civil war, many more arrived as humanitarian aid workers, driving ambulances, helping distribute international assistance. As the Islamist forces among the anti-Assad opposition rose in power and began to take over the major military roles from the secular democratic opposition, more Muslims from around the world arrived to join them. In some of the Islamist organizations, foreign fighters soon outnumbered Syrians.
In early 2015, the New York Times chronicled the wide range of reasons for the surge of potential fighters flocking to Syria to join the most extremist organizations. ‘Young men in Bosnia and Kosovo are traveling to Syria for financial gain, including recruiting bonuses some groups offer, counterterrorism specialists say. Others from the Middle East and North Africa are attracted more by the ideology and the Islamic State’s self-declared status as a caliphate. Counterterrorism specialists have seen criminal gang members from as far as Sweden seeking adventure and violence in the fight.’
There is no question that the process of embracing extremist Islamism very often begins in response to long histories of dispossession, disenfranchisement, exclusion and denial of rights among immigrant, Muslim or particular Islamic sects, and other minority communities in countries around the world. In the US, federal and state government policies are in place that continue to marginalize Muslim, Arab and other immigrant communities. Members of those communities, particularly young people, are often targeted during wars in the Middle East. President Obama acknowledged that ‘engagement with communities can’t be a cover for surveillance. It can’t securitize our relationship with Muslim Americans, dealing with them solely through the prism of law enforcement.’ But he didn’t do or even propose anything to actually change the US and local state and municipal policies that do just this. Further, he made the statement at a conference designed to counter recruiting by ISIS and similar organizations, which was held a full seven months after he had ordered the bombing of Syria to begin.
In many European, American, and other Western Muslim communities, support for ISIS, al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations exists despite, rather than because of, the violence of these groups. In 2013 and 2014, reports surfaced of European Muslims travelling to Syria to join ISIS with their entire families, babies and children included, to establish new lives in the so-called caliphate. At the end of 2014, the Washington Post profiled a British father, arriving in Syria to join ISIS with his family – his ‘first four children had been born in London, his native city, but his new baby, wrapped in a fuzzy brown onesie, was born in territory controlled by the Islamic