And that total didn’t take into account the more than 500,000 Iraqi children killed by US-imposed economic sanctions in the 1990s in the run-up to the war. It didn’t take into account the expansion of the wars to Libya and Syria, or include President Obama’s expanding drone war in Somalia and Yemen. It didn’t take into account the rapidly escalating casualty figures in 2014 and 2015 throughout the theatres of the war on terror. But the shocking death toll is still a vital reality check on those who would assert that somehow the war on terror is ‘worth the price’, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously described the death of half a million Iraqi children under sanctions.
This book aims to help probe behind the propaganda, help sort out the facts from the mythology, help figure out what we need to know to build a path away from war as the default option. There may be some duplication between some of the questions, and some sections provide different levels of detail than others. The questions are organized by subject, designed for readers to pick and choose, find a subject of interest and delve into the questions most relevant to that subject, then come back later to other issues.
Inevitably, writing a book like this presents enormous challenges, not least the rapid pace of events. Just when you think you’ve got most of the region covered, Yemen explodes. Just when you think you’ve clarified the possibilities and dangers for the Iran nuclear talks, the interim agreement is announced and anti-diplomacy hardliners in Tehran and especially in Washington start their campaigns to undermine it. This is not a full, definitive account of ISIS, its theology, or its strategy. This is an overview, designed to provide a basic understanding so we can move toward identifying and implementing new alternative strategies, instead of war.
Ultimately, that is the reason for this book: to help activists, policymakers, journalists, students – and all the people in their orbit – with the hard task of changing the discourse and turning Western policy around. The basic assumption underlying this book is that you can’t bomb extremism – you can only bomb people. And even if some of the people you bomb are extremists, those bombing campaigns cause more extremism, not less. We need to move away from war as an answer to extremism, and instead build a new approach grounded in diplomacy and negotiation, arms embargos and international law, the United Nations, humanitarian assistance and human rights.
Phyllis Bennis
Washington DC
October 2015
Political Islam in its modern form, as Mahmoud Mamdani states in Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, is ‘more a domestic product than a foreign import’. It was not, he reminds us, ‘bred in isolation… Political Islam was born in the colonial period. But it did not give rise to a terrorist movement until the Cold War.’ The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was born almost a century ago. Its followers in neighbouring countries contested for power (rarely winning any) with governments across the region. The mobilization against the US-backed Shah in Iran in the 1970s resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in perhaps the most powerful, self-defined Islamic government of the 20th century. But today’s movement known as political Islam, with its military mobilizations holding pride of place ahead of its political formations, emerged in its first coherent identity with the US-armed, US-paid, Pakistani-trained mujahideen warriors who fought the Soviet troops in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards. Continuing in the post-Vietnam Cold War 1980s, the Afghanistan War ended with the defeat and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.
The specific origins of ISIS, also variously known as ISIL, Daesh or the Islamic State, lie in the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The country was already in terrible shape, following decades of war (the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-89, then the first US Gulf War in 1991) and a dozen years of crippling economic sanctions imposed in 1990. Even after the first wars, and despite brutal repression of any potential opposition and the long-standing political and economic privileging of the large (20 per cent or so) Sunni minority, the majority of Iraqis lived middle-class lives, including government-provided free healthcare and education, with some of the best medical and scientific institutions in the Arab world. The sanctions, imposed in the name of the United Nations but created and enforced by the US, had shredded much of the social fabric of the once-prosperous, secular, cosmopolitan country. The Pentagon’s ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign that opened the US invasion destroyed much of Iraq’s physical infrastructure, as well as the lives of over 7,000 Iraqi civilians.
How did the 2003 invasion of Iraq affect the growth of ISIS?
Among the first acts of the US-UK occupation were the dissolution of the Iraqi military, the dismantling of the civil service, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party. All three institutions represented core concentrations of secular nationalist interests in Iraq, and their collapse was part of the reason for the turn toward religious and sectarian identity that began to replace national identity for many Iraqis. At the same time, in all three institutions, particularly at the highest echelons, Sunni Iraqis were more likely to suffer from the loss of income and prestige – since Sunnis held a disproportionate share of top jobs and top positions in the military and the Baath Party. So, right from the beginning, a sectarian strand emerged at the very centre of the rising opposition to the occupation.
Despite the Bush administration’s dismissals of the opposition as nothing but Baathist leftovers and foreign fighters, the Iraqi resistance was far broader. Within months of the March 2003 invasion, militias and informal groups of fighters were challenging the US-UK occupation across the country. One of the earliest was al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI, sometimes known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni militia created in 2004 by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. He was Jordanian, although it appears most of the early members of AQI were Iraqis. Al-Zarqawi announced publicly that AQI had pledged loyalty to the leadership of al-Qaeda and specifically to Osama bin Laden. The militia’s tactics included bombings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), as well as reported kidnappings and beheadings. While AQI began with a focus on the US and other coalition forces, aiming to rid Iraq of foreign occupiers, it soon expanded to adopt a more explicitly sectarian agenda, in which the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government, military and police forces as well as Shi’a civilians were also targeted.
Over the next several years, the forces fighting against the occupation of Iraq became more sectarian, moving toward what would become a bloody civil war fought alongside the resistance to occupation. Beginning in 2006, the US shifted its Iraq strategy, deciding to move away from direct fighting against Sunni anti-occupation fighters and instead to try to co-opt them. The essence of the Sunni Awakening plan was that the US would bankroll Sunni tribal leaders, those who had earlier led the anti-US resistance, paying them off to fight with the occupation and US-backed Shi’a-dominated government instead of against them. They would also fight against the Sunni outliers, those who rejected the Awakening movement, which included al-Qaeda in Iraq. And just about the time that the Sunni Awakening was taking hold, al-Qaeda in Iraq changed its name – this time to Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI.
In August 2014, when Iraq’s Anbar province had been largely overrun by ISIS, its governor, Ahmed al-Dulaimi, described for the New York Times the trajectory of an ISIS leader whom al-Dulaimi had taught in military school. ‘It was never clear that he would turn out like that,’ al-Dulaimi told the Times.
‘He was from a simple family, with high morals, but all his brothers went in that direction [becoming jihadists].’ After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, al-Dulaimi’s former pupil joined al-Qaeda in Iraq