Detained Relative of Saddam’s is Accused of Participating in Islamic State Crimes
The head of Lebanon’s General Directorate of General Security (DGSG) intelligence agency, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, announced on 19 August that an Islamic State (IS) operative involved in one of the group’s worst atrocities in Iraq in 2014 had been arrested on Lebanese territory weeks ago. The detained man, Abdullah Yasser Sabawi al-Hassan, is a relative of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Husayn. The case is, however, quite murky.
THE CRIME FAMILY
Abdullah is the grandson of Saddam’s half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti, thus Abdullah is Saddam’s great-nephew. Ibrahim, a very senior official in Saddam’s regime, the intelligence chief during the first part of the Gulf War in 1990-91, was naturally one of the most-wanted men after the invasion; apprehended and sentenced to death by the Iraqi courts, he died in prison from cancer in July 2013.
Ibrahim, born in 1947, had two full brothers, both just a few years younger than him, Watban Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the Iraqi Interior Minister in the early 1990s who also died on death row (in August 2015), and Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the long-time head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) or Mukhabarat, who was brutally executed in January 2007, about two weeks after Saddam himself went to the gallows.
Abdullah’s father was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2005, along with Ibrahim’s five other sons (all nephews of Saddam), for their role in “actively supporting attacks against Coalition forces and the Iraqi people”.
ARREST IN LEBANON
Abdullah was arrested in the coastal resort town of Byblos (or Jubayl) in the north-west Lebanon, about half-hour north of Beirut and about the same distance south of Tripoli, on an Interpol warrant issued by the Iraqi government. It is not precisely clear when Abdullah was arrested—reported dates are 13 June and 11 June—but it seems the date was deliberately chosen (see below).
Abdullah “is accused of carrying out criminal operations that resulted in the death of thousands of innocents,” DGDG chief Maj.-Gen. Ibrahim told Iraq’s IMN TV. “We operate as per the international law, the judiciary, and the warrants of exchanging and extraditing fugitives among nations, especially a brotherly country like Iraq.
The crime Abdullah is accused of is the Camp Speicher massacre, which took place almost exactly eight years before his arrest, on 12 June 2014, the day after IS captured Mosul and swept across central Iraq towards Baghdad, conquering territories that were then proclaimed to be part of its reborn “caliphate” at the end of that month. Camp Speicher was an Iraqi military base in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, and when IS took it, the jihadists separated out the cadets by sect and systematically murdered about 1,500 Shi’is in a genocidal bloodletting that they made sure to broadcast.
SADDAM AND THE ISLAMIC STATE
As IS grabbed territory in 2013-14, in Syria and then (overtly) in Iraq, the presence of former regime elements (FRE) from the Saddam era in senior posts was notable. The takeover of Mosul, for example, was planned by a former captain in Saddam’s Republican Guards, Adnan al-Bilawi (Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi), and the Speicher atrocity was directed by Wissam al-Zubaydi (Abu Nabil al-Anbari or Abu al-Mughirah al-Qahtani), a former policeman in Saddam’s regime, who went on to lead the creation of IS’s “wilayat” (province) in Libya.
During Saddam’s long war with Clerical Iran (1980-88), his regime had turned increasingly towards Islam as a source of legitimacy: the Iranian Revolution had super-charged the rising tide of religious sentiment across the region that had become notable in the 1970s, in the wake of the Six-Day War, when Israel shattered not only the armies of Egypt and Syria but the “secular” pan-Arabist ideology they espoused. Saddam looked to Islamists in his foreign policy from the early 1980s, and began holding massive, public Islamic conferences for these forces in Baghdad, hoping to draw to himself some of the popularity these groups had. It was not possible in this atmosphere to keep the Islamism external, and various aspects of the state domestically began to be Islamized in the late 1980s, an escalating trend through the 1990s that included a mania for mosque-building and the implementation of a version of the shari’a.
There was a distinctly sectarian edge to Saddam’s anti-Iranian wartime propaganda and after the Shi’a revolt that followed the defeat in Kuwait in 1991 this intensified: a Sunni-hegemonic regime, based significantly on the tribes from Saddam’s home area that he trusted, took hold, and Shi’is were openly regarded with suspicion—having additional security structures like the Fedayeen Saddam militia placed throughout their areas in the south, for instance.
In 1993, Saddam formalised the turn to Islam in the “Faith Campaign”, ostensibly ecumenical but in reality pro-Sunni: their mosques got more money, and the patronage system empowered Sunni imams in a way that had not been true earlier, reshaping the social landscape. While the Faith Campaign likely started as a cynical measure to shore-up Saddam’s tottering regime, it took on a life of its own. Saddam’s wanted a statist Islam with himself at the helm—an Islamized regime did not mean a change to his mentality about power: those who followed an Islam that opposed Saddam would be eliminated—but it was a difficult tiger to ride.
In the misery under the sanctions, which Saddam’s cross-border networks could not meaningfully evade, people fell back on their faith, and the secret policemen sent to keep watch on this development in the mosques also found Islam more convincing and consoling than Ba’thism. The trend of Salafism seeping into the military and security forces became a serious issue, the difference being that unlike ten years earlier it did not lead to automatic ejection from the ranks. Saddam regarded the conspiratorial, transnational Muslim Brotherhood as a threat, but Salafism could be accommodated—or so he thought.
Many Salafis did reach a compact with Saddam’s Islamized state; many others did not, and by the end of the regime a powerful, underground militant Salafi Trend had been created, partly due to the new environment of state encouragement and partly because the once-totalitarian regime no longer had the strength to stop it. It is from this milieu that some of IS’s most infamous leaders emerged. By 2000, Barzan Ibrahim was warning Saddam that the intelligence picture suggested if things continued on then the regime would be overwhelmed by the “religious trend”, but by that time Saddam himself had come to the faith: he swatted aside the objections of his most senior officials and continued the state alliance with the Salafi Trend.
This was the Iraq the U.S.-led coalition found: a traumatised country, its state and society deeply Islamized, its social structures reoriented especially in the Sunni areas to empower religious and tribal leaders, with inflamed sectarian tensions, a militant Salafi underground beyond official reach, and a regime that had degenerated in its effort to circumvent the sanctions from a totalitarian system to an effectively criminal state that generated revenue through a cross-border grey economy, which also heavily involved the tribes and patronised the imams and mosques. These were the foundations, ideologically and materially, that IS had to work with when it arrived in early 2002.
ABDULLAH YASSER SABAWI AL-HASSAN
Abdullah is the first close relative of Saddam’s arrested for direct participation in IS’s crimes. Abdullah was born in 1995 and reached the age of cognition when the sectarian-tinged Islamization of Saddam’s Iraq was at its height. His family, as mentioned above, were intimately involved in the post-Saddam insurgency that IS ultimately annexed. One of his uncles (one of Ibrahim’s sons), Ibrahim Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, was killed fighting for IS in 2015. From the context, then, it is not difficult to imagine that Abdullah got involved with IS. But there is another version of the story.
Abdullah’s uncle, Saad Sabawi, one of those sanctioned in 2005, has claimed that Abdullah left Iraq around the time the Ba’thi regime came down in 2003, at which time he was eight-years-old, and has never returned to his homeland, apparently in part because Abdullah was stripped of his Iraqi citizenship. (Abdullah seems to have another passport, though it is unclear from which state.) By Saad’s account, Abdullah was taken to Yemen, where he stayed until Huthis, the local manifestation of the Iranian Revolution, overthrew the government and expanded their jihad through much of the strategically important populated territories in the west. Saad says that Abdullah registered with the United Nations refugee agency in Lebanon in 2018 and has “lived quietly” in the country ever since.
This is what an uncle might be expected to say, even one who had not been involved in the Iraqi jihad, but there are other considerations that lend it some plausibility. Both Iraq and Lebanon are under Iranian domination, making “legal” claims from either highly dubious. The Speicher accusation is noteworthy because the atrocity is, for good and obvious reasons, a highly emotive one among Shi’is; it has also been manipulated by Iran to gain popular acceptance for its imperialism, presented as a project to protect Shi’is from Sunni jihadists that mean to destroy them. And Saddam’s family have been, for Iran and the Shi’a-led Iraqi government over which it has so much influence, highly important symbolic targets.
So there Abdullah’s story stands, at the present time, with competing narratives setting social media ablaze: he is either one of the Islamic State’s fanatics and sectarian murders, from a family with a long history of the same, finally being brought to justice; or the victim of a frame-up for the crimes of a family he is barely old enough to remember by an Islamic Republic no less fanatical and murderously sectarian.