Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and what was his role in the rise of ISIS?
In June 2006 al-Zarqawi was killed by US bombs. According to some sources, four months later Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced as the new leader of AQI, having been released from 10 months or so in the US-run Bucca prison in Iraq. Other sources claim that al-Baghdadi spent as much as five years in the US prison, and that after the death of al-Zarqawi, AQI was taken over by a different person with a similar name – Abu Omar al-Baghdadi – who may have led the organization until 2010.
However long Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spent at Bucca under the control of US troops, there is little doubt he would have seen, heard of, and perhaps experienced at least some of the brutality that characterized US treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Only a few months before al-Baghdadi was imprisoned at Bucca prison, the torture photos from Abu Ghraib prison had been made public. It is unclear whether any prisoners who experienced that brutality at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere were present at Bucca with al-Baghdadi, but it is certain that reports of the torture were extensive throughout the US prison system in Iraq.
The time in prison was also an opportunity for strategic planning and recruiting for AQI’s expanding anti-occupation and anti-Shi’a resistance. Other former prisoners in Bucca, in 2004 and later, recall al-Baghdadi’s arrival and the role he and others played in education, organizing and planning for future military actions. There is little doubt that al-Baghdadi’s time in US custody was instrumental in his rise to the leadership of what would become one of the most powerful extremist militias in the Middle East.
Before and during al-Baghdadi’s incarceration in the US military prison, the anti-occupation resistance was rapidly expanding. As The Guardian described it, ‘When Baghdadi, aged 33, arrived at Bucca, the Sunni-led anti-US insurgency was gathering steam across central and western Iraq. An invasion that had been sold as a war of liberation had become a grinding occupation. Iraq’s Sunnis, disenfranchised by the overthrow of their patron, Saddam Hussein, were taking the fight to US forces – and starting to turn their guns towards the beneficiaries of Hussein’s overthrow, the country’s majority Shi’a population.’
Did the US troop surge in 2008 diminish sectarian fighting?
Although the Bush administration claimed that its troop ‘surge’ of 30,000 additional US military forces was the reason for the relative decline in sectarian fighting by 2008, the reality was far more complicated. It included the buying off of most of the leaders of Sunni tribal militias, the impact of a unilateral ceasefire declared in August 2007 by Shi’a militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, and the horrific reality that the sectarian battles had largely achieved their goal. That is, by 2008 most mixed villages and towns had been ethnically cleansed to become almost entirely Sunni or Shi’a. Baghdad, historically a cosmopolitan mash-up of every religion and ethnicity, had become a city of districts defined by sect. Whether Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, or other, neighbourhoods were largely separated by giant cement blast walls.
In 2008, the US turned its commitment to paying the Sunni Awakening militias over to the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government. Almost immediately, payments stopped, and the US-backed government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki escalated its sectarian practices. More and more Sunni generals and other military leaders, as well as ordinary Sunni Iraqis, turned against the government even as US troops were slowly being withdrawn, and by 2009 and into 2010, a serious Sunni uprising was under way.
The Islamic State in Iraq, or ISI, had never joined the Sunni Awakening. It maintained its focus on fighting against the US occupation and the Iraqi government, although its military activities had diminished somewhat as the overall sectarian warfare had waned. But as the sectarian fighting escalated again in 2010, ISI re-emerged as a leading Sunni force, attacking the government, the official Iraqi military, and the expanding Shi’a militias allied to the government, as well as targeting Shi’a civilians. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was by that point (whether newly in power or not) the clear chief of ISI, and he began to strengthen the military capacity of the organization, including by several attacks on prisons aimed at freeing key military leaders of the group.
How did ISIS begin to expand beyond Iraq?
In 2011, ISI emerged for the first time across the border in Syria. The uprising there was just beginning to morph into a multifaceted civil war, and already the sectarian Sunni-Shi’a split was becoming a major component. That started with the proxy war between regional powers – Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’a Iran – but soon spilled over to include an internal divide between Syria’s majority Sunni population and the minority but privileged Alawites, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam. ISI took up arms against the Alawite/Shi’a regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. ISI was fighting alongside the wide range of secular and Sunni militias – including the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat an-Nusra, or Nusra Front – that were already confronting the regime. Soon, ISI turned to fight against those same anti-Assad forces, challenging those who rejected ISI’s power grabs, its violence, or its extremist definitions of Islam.
ISI changed its name again, this time to ISIS – for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. By some accounts the acronym actually referred to the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, Arabic for ‘greater Syria’. (See ‘How did the name ISIS evolve?’) Still led by al-Baghdadi and loyal to al-Qaeda, ISIS was rapidly gaining strength, not least from its recruiting of experienced fighters and acquisition of heavier arms in Iraq. It fought on both sides of the Iraq-Syria frontier, against governments and civilians in both countries, capturing crossing posts and essentially erasing the border altogether. In Anbar province and other Sunni-majority parts of northern and central Iraq, ISIS was able to establish a large military presence, supported by many Sunnis as a useful protector against the Shi’a-dominated government’s sectarian practices.
A major difference between ISIS and other militias, and particularly between ISIS and al-Qaeda, was that ISIS moved to seize territory. In doing so, it was not only asserting the theoretical goal of creating a future ‘caliphate’, it was actually doing so by occupying, holding, and governing an expanding land base across the Iraq-Syria border. In 2012 and into 2013, ISIS expanded its reach, establishing territorial control over large areas of northern Syria, including in and around the Syrian commercial centre of Aleppo. ISIS based its core governing functions in the city of Raqqa, which in mid-2014 was named its official capital.
Soon, however, relations deteriorated between ISIS and al-Qaeda, and between ISIS leader al-Baghdadi and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. From 20l3 on, al-Baghdadi tried to bring the ‘official’ al-Qaeda Syrian franchise, the Nusra Front, under the control of ISIS. At one point ISIS announced that Nusra had ‘merged’ with ISIS, although Nusra denied the claim. Al-Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri, watching the rising power of ISIS and its ambitious leader, restated his official endorsement for the Nusra Front as al-Qaeda’s official Syrian counterpart. There were other disagreements as well, including the divergence between al-Qaeda’s religiously defined goal of establishing a global caliphate at some indeterminate point in the future and ISIS’s tactic of seizing land, imposing its version of sharia law, and declaring it part of a present-day ISIS-run caliphate. The disagreements and power struggles continued, and in February 2014 al-Zawahiri officially renounced ISIS, criticizing, among other things, its violence against other Muslims.
Five months later, ISIS declared itself a global caliphate. Al-Baghdadi was named caliph, and once again the organization’s name changed – this time to the ‘Islamic State’. Since that time, small groups of Islamist militants in Sinai, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere have declared their loyalty to al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, although it remains doubtful those links are operational. Throughout the summer of 2014, as the Iraqi military largely collapsed, ISIS moved aggressively