Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Journey to Al-Qaeda and the Origins of Jihadism in Iraq

The founder of what is now the Islamic State (IS), the Jordanian jihadist Ahmad al-Khalayleh, universally known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed seventeen years ago this month, on 7 June 2006. Zarqawi got involved in jihadism in the late 1980s and developed a jihadist current using sponsorship from Al-Qaeda in the training camps of Taliban Afghanistan from 1999 to 2001, which he brought to Iraq in 2002, while Saddam Husayn was still in power. How Zarqawi did that—the opportunity he detected in Iraq, his ability to establish himself in the country while the old regime was in place, and the relationships he developed with the rogue regimes in Syria and Iran along the way—remain instructive in terms of the persistence of Islamic militancy down to the present day. In October 2004, Zarqawi did what he had so long resisted doing: gave bay’a (an oath or pledge of allegiance) to Al-Qaeda’s then-leader Usama bin Laden. The alliance between Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State movement would be publicly terminated in February 2014, months before IS declared its “caliphate”. The contest between these two methodologies had been perhaps the defining feature of the jihadist movement in the decade since, but the seeds of the rupture go all the way back to the beginning.

ZARQAWI’S EARLY LIFE: FINDING ISLAM AND MISSING THE ANTI-SOVIET JIHAD

Zarqawi—contrary to reports that he was of Palestinian descent—was an East Bank Jordanian from the Bani Hassan tribe, born in the town of Zarqa (hence the kunya), on 30 October 1966. There is little doubt that Zarqawi’s teenage years and early twenties were a distinctly irreligious and rackety period in his life: he is said to have abandoned studies and never finished high school, been fired from the video shop he worked at, taken up drinking and even drugs, joined street gangs, regularly got involved in fights, committed multiple rapes (against men, as well as women), and had so many tattoos he was known as “the Green Man”.¹ The extent to which these stories are invented by anti-IS political forces within Iraq and regional intelligence services to blacken Zarqawi’s image, and/or have been inflated by Zarqawi and his stenographers themselves to emphasise the redemptive nature of his conversion to jihadi-Salafism, is unknowable.

Zarqawi was “born again” in late 1988, around his twenty-second birthday, and in the spring of 1989 he went to Afghanistan, but was too late to participate in the anti-Soviet jihad. The Red Army had withdrawn in February 1989. In November 1989, Abdullah Azzam was assassinated. Azzam was the Palestinian cleric whose fatwa had provoked the first major Islamist foreign fighter flow of the modern era—mostly of Arabs—to Afghanistan to combat the Soviet occupation. In the wake of Azzam’s death, the “Arab-Afghan” community splintered. Nonetheless, Zarqawi stayed around to war against the unexpectedly durable Communist clone regime the Soviets left behind in Kabul, which was only deposed in April 1992.

TRYING TO BRING JIHAD TO JORDAN AND IMPRISONMENT

In Zarqawi’s absence, the situation in Jordan had shifted in the jihadists’ favour.

Saddam Husayn conquered and annexed Kuwait in August 1990. It was a most blatant act of aggression and theft, swallowing up an oil-rich and defenceless principality, but Saddam was able to cast it as something nobler. By portraying Kuwait as in effect a state occupied by Westerners, Saddam was able on the one hand to portray the conquest as the will of God,² summoning the memory of the Crusader States, referring to his invasion as a “jihad” and to himself as a latter-day Saladin liberating Muslim lands, a foreshadowing of the turn to Islam that would become ever-more extreme over the next thirteen years. On the other hand, Saddam was able to claim he was recovering the Kuwaiti state and its oil wealth for Muslims, a line of propaganda that played on both anti-Western sentiments and populist regional resentments against the rich Peninsula Arabs.

This fusion of religious and socialist themes found resonance in significant parts of the Arab world, in Tunisia, Algeria, and particularly in Yemen, Jordan, and among the Palestinians, whose leader, Yasser Arafat, made the most unhinged decision in a career of unhinged decisions by declaring for Saddam, creating fissures in his own Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and ensuring the PLO was immediately cut off from its main sources of finance in the Gulf states.

The Jordanian predicament was an especial cause of concern in the West, since it was so unexpected: the state is for all practical purposes a colony of the Americans, Israelis, and Saudis. Jordan’s King Husayn (r. 1952-99) refused to enforce sanctions on Saddam’s Iraq or back what would become Operation DESERT STORM to get Saddam out of Kuwait. Instead, King Husayn formulated what he called a “compromise” that allowed Saddam to gain from his aggression and acted as Saddam’s de facto ambassador in trying to sell this “solution” in the West. This caused serious friction, particularly with an otherwise ardent friend of the Hashemite monarchy, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had emerged as the leader of the Western coalition standing against Saddam.³ When Mrs. Thatcher met King Husayn at Downing Street on 31 August 1990, she bluntly upbraided him for the line he was taking,⁴ but the fact was, as Mrs. Thatcher knew, King Husayn was dealing with a popular sentiment that could have led to his downfall if he overtly signed-on with the anti-Saddam coalition. Though Saddam was evicted unceremoniously from Kuwait in one-hundred hours at the end of February 1991, the jihadist trend in Jordan made the most of the febrile atmosphere Saddam’s reckless gamble in Kuwait had stirred up. This was the situation Zarqawi found when returning to Jordan in late 1993.⁵

Zarqawi tried to bring jihad home, joining Bayat al-Imam (Pledge to the Imam), run by Issam al-Barqawi (Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi), regarded by many as the top jihadi-Salafist ideologue. Zarqawi had met Al-Maqdisi in Peshawar and Al-Maqdisi had returned to Jordan in 1992. Acquiring weapons from abandoned Iraqi stockpiles, Al-Maqdisi and Zarqawi set about brining off an attack within Jordan. Zarqawi stored the weapons and then handed them to Al-Maqdisi, though Zarqawi kept hold of two bombs, intending to use them in a suicide operation in Israel. Bayt al-Imam’s plans for domestic terrorism were vaguely farcical and the group was infiltrated from the get-go by the General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Jordan’s secret police. In March 1994, as the Bayt al-Imam terrorists moved towards executing their attack, the GID rounded everyone up. Zarqawi was jailed for weapons possession and membership in an illegal group.⁶

In prison, Zarqawi’s religious conviction deepened, most grimly expressed by using a razor blade to remove one of his tattoos without anaesthetic.⁷ Al-Maqdisi is often described as the “mentor” of Zarqawi; it is unclear how accurate this is. Regardless, prison—an environment favouring the physically tough, and natural, charismatic leaders of men—was Zarqawi’s domain.⁸ Whatever tutelage Zarqawi was under was outgrown behind the wire and, within two years of Saddam’s fall, Zarqawi broke publicly with Al-Maqdisi. Zarqawi had been sentenced to fifteen years in jail, but served just under five, being released in an amnesty shortly after King Husayn died in February 1999.

FIRST CONNECTIONS TO INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM, AL-QAEDA, AND IRAN

After getting out of prison in Jordan, Zarqawi quickly returned to jihadism. By August 1999, if not before, Zarqawi was in Pakistan. Some accounts suggest that Zarqawi intended to atone for missing out on the anti-Soviet jihad by moving from Pakistan to fight the Russians in Chechnya. If so, he never made it: Zarqawi was arrested and held for about a week in Peshawar. No explanation has ever been given by the Pakistanis for releasing Zarqawi, but this practice was not so unusual: with the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), numerous foreign jihadists that diligent Pakistani policemen picked up were able to escape that summer.⁹ The ISI had run the Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan for six years before the Soviets invaded in December 1979, and when it tired of the Mujahideen’s internecine squabbles had turned to the Taliban as its means of colonising Afghanistan after 1994. In September 1996, the ISI, through the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda organisation with which it was intertwined, had captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, and by 1998 had occupied ninety percent of Afghanistan. Zarqawi crossed into Afghanistan, to join this ISI-constructed “Emirate” administered by the Taliban-Qaeda regime, probably in September 1999.¹⁰

At the time of Zarqawi’s arrival in Afghanistan, he was part of a notable trickle of Arab jihadists from the Levant, mostly Syria and Jordan. Zarqawi quickly became the effective leader of this cadre and was sought out weeks after arriving by one of Al-Qaeda’s military leaders, Muhammad Saladin Zaydan, better known as Sayf al-Adel, who wanted to ensure these jihadists around Zarqawi joined Usama bin Laden’s cause so that if they succeeded in raising the flag of jihad in the Levant—an area the jihadists had struggled to infiltrate—they would do so as part of Al-Qaeda, and not under the banner of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (Abu Musab al-Suri), a Syrian jihadist critic of Bin Laden’s. Setmariam regarded himself as criticising Bin Laden from the position of a peer and Bin Laden feared this was true, not least because Setmariam had the uncomplicated support of the Taliban. Neither side wanted a direct confrontation; whoever recruited the Zarqawi-led jihadists would indirectly land a blow against the other.

On 30 November 1999, Jordan’s GID, after detecting a telephone call from one of the point-men in Al-Qaeda’s foreign attacks infrastructure, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (Abu Zubaydah), moved against a cell of sixteen jihadists led by Khadr Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian, and including Raed Hijazi, a Palestinian born in California. The plan had been to attack the Radisson Hotel and religious sites in Amman frequented by foreigners, especially Jewish Israelis, on New Year’s Day. The GID warned the Americans that this was likely part of a larger plan, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) got nowhere in unravelling it.¹¹ In the event, it fell to a single sharp-witted border guard, Diana Dean, to thwart Algerian jihadist Ahmed Ressam as he tried to cross into the United States on 14 December 1999 from Canada to blow up Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Though the “Millennium Plot” had failed, Zarqawi’s involvement on the Jordanian end of it had made Al-Qaeda’s leaders take him more seriously.

In December 1999, in Kandahar, Zarqawi had his first meeting with Bin Laden, and it was a difficult one. Bin Laden was already hesitant about Zarqawi because he suspected that the recent Levantine arrivals were riddled with GID agents—among the reasons Sayf al-Adel, as security chief, was sent to deal with them—and that perhaps Zarqawi himself had been turned during his time in prison.¹² Then, at the meeting itself, Zarqawi resisted giving bay’a to Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden found Zarqawi’s ferocious sectarian hatred of Shi’is somewhat alarming.¹³ Still, Al-Qaeda’s leader was convinced by Sayf that it was worth having Zarqawi within the tent and to give Zarqawi $200,000 in start-up cash to establish a training camp. Zarqawi’s camp would be created in Herat, in the far west of Afghanistan, near the Iranian border, partly for logistics reasons—recruits from the Levant tended to cross Iran, and it was consistent Iranian state policy to facilitate Al-Qaeda’s movements by not stamping passports¹⁴—and partly it was a reflection of Zarqawi’s autonomy within Al-Qaeda’s network. Herat, after all, was about as far from Al-Qaeda’s centre of operations in eastern Afghanistan as it was possible to get.

It was in the Herat camp in December 1999 or January 2000 that Zarqawi created the Islamic State movement, which went under the name Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of the Levant). The flag over the entrance of the Herat camp read, “Tawhid wal-Jihad” (Monotheism and Holy War).¹⁵ Jund al-Sham, consisting of about 150 jihadists at the outset, quickly grew in numbers and reach.

The Taliban-Qaeda regime was overthrown after 9/11. Bin Laden had taken some steps in preparation for this, appointing Zarqawi to prepare a possible fallback position in northern Iraq, creating a jihadist merger known as Ansar al-Islam,¹⁶ which had established a mini emirate in Kurdistan over the previous eighteen months and begun a war against the independent Kurdish government that had developed under the protection of the Anglo-American no-fly zone since 1991. Captured Ansar operatives said the group was simultaneously receiving covert support from Saddam, since it was challenging his main enemies. (There is also evidence, including from Ansar’s own messaging,¹⁷ that the group had backing from Iran.¹⁸) When the moment came for Bin Laden to flee Afghanistan, however, he and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, went into Pakistan, while Zarqawi followed much of Al-Qaeda’s military and religious leadership into Iran in the first days of January 2002, under direct permission from Qassem Sulaymani, the head of the expeditionary Quds Force within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).¹⁹

Once in Iran, Zarqawi was briefly arrested, but quickly let go.²⁰ Thereafter, Zarqawi was given assistance by the Iranian theocracy,²¹ some from the IRGC directly, including false passports and communications equipment,²² and some via the old Afghan Mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose group, by this time an extension of IRGC, had been used to facilitate Zarqawi and the Qaedaists entering Iran.²³ Under protection of the Pasdaran, Zarqawi was inter alia able to facilitate the transfer of the remnants of his networks from Afghanistan into Iran, and prepare to move them into Iraq.²⁴ Throughout this period, Zarqawi was in close contact with Sayf al-Adel, by then Al-Qaeda’s military emir, who had been co-opted by the IRGC. Nominally under house arrest, Sayf was able, for example, to coordinate with Zarqawi for the May 2003 bombings against two of Iran’s regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. There is also reporting Zarqawi received military training at an IRGC base in Mashhad.

It was while sheltered by the clerical regime in Iran that Zarqawi tried once again to get involved in international terrorism, and the Iran connection was not simply circumstantial. In mid-2001, Zarqawi went to Kandahar to ask Al-Qaeda’s leadership for $35,000 “to finance a plan for his fighters to infiltrate Israel … [and] a few days before [9/11], he met in Iran with a Jordanian ally and ordered him to set up a cell in Germany to strike Jewish targets there” [italics added]. The ideas for these two plots were originally formulated before 11 September 2001, but the operational phases took place entirely while Zarqawi was in Iran in 2002.²⁵ Zarqawi’s attempt to send jihadist terrorists into Israel was thwarted when the three operatives were arrested by Turkish police in the far-eastern city of Van in February 2002.²⁶ The plot against Jews in Germany was led by Mohamed Abu Dhess (Abu Ali) and intended among other things to blow up the Jewish Museum in Berlin and a Jewish-owned bar in Dusseldorf. Dhess was in regular contact with Zarqawi, being walked through his proposed attack.²⁷ The breakup of Dhess’ “Tawhid cell”, in April 2002, foiled one of the first—perhaps the first—terrorist plot by the Islamic State movement in the West, long before the invasion of Iraq and the declaration of the “caliphate”, showing that the Zarqawists’ desire to strike the West is not a response to Western actions, nor is it tied to IS’s holding or losing of territory.

ZARQAWI MOVES TO IRAQ—BEFORE THE INVASION

Zarqawi crossed into northern Iraq in April 2002, being sheltered in Ansar al-Islam’s emirate and apparently cooperating in Ansar’s attempt to assassinate the Iraqi Kurdish Prime Minister Barham Salih.²⁸ By May 2002, Zarqawi was in Baghdad.²⁹ Putting aside the larger argument over Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda, once Zarqawi was in Baghdad, he was joined by a cadre of senior Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists.³⁰

It is inconceivable on its face that Saddam was unaware of these people in his capital, but the evidence Saddam knew is stronger than mere supposition. Whether or not the CIA intelligence is correct that one of Zarqawi’s deputies in Ansar maintained a liaison relationship with Saddam’s regime,³¹ Jordan verifiably, at least twice, sent extradition requests for Zarqawi to Saddam in 2002, along with detailed information on Zarqawi’s whereabouts and activities; these requests were ignored. It is difficult to believe Saddam’s regime lacked the ability to locate Zarqawi,³² not least because the Iraqi intelligence services and police did arrest a few of Zarqawi’s circle³³—only to let them go immediately after questioning in what looks more like an intelligence-gathering exercise than an effort to thwart the Zarqawists.

In Iraq, Zarqawi found fertile ground for his jihadist project as a result of  Saddam’s Islamization of the state and society, which had begun in the mid-1980s, been intensified in the early 1990s amid the Kuwait war and the collapse of the Soviet Union,³⁴ and was formally institutionalised in 1993 as the “Faith Campaign” (al-Hamla al-Imaniya). Saddam implemented Islamic law,³⁵ normalised a Salafized version of Islam in a country where it had been quite alien, imposed structural-societal changes such as the empowerment of imams in the Sunni areas,³⁶ and inflamed sectarian tensions to a height unknown in Iraq’s modern history,³⁷ which all played into Zarqawi’s hands.

SADDAM’S ISLAMIST REGIME

There is no contest from anyone seriously acquainted with the subject that in foreign policy, from the 1980s onward, Saddam was willing to support any Islamist, including Bin Laden himself.³⁸ In April 2002, at the height of the Palestinian “Intifada”—a campaign of violence significantly orchestrated by Saddam’s Iraq and Clerical Iran to derail a “War on Terror” that had identified them as targets—Saddam publicly announced an increase in the rewards paid to the families of suicide bombers from HAMAS and other Islamist groups. Even the argument that this was purely instrumental, that Islam acquired no guiding place in the policy-making process and the Islamists were simply a “tool to achieve policy goals”, takes an axe to the root of the myth that Saddam’s regime had no connection to Islamic militancy.³⁹

Long before 2002-03, “compartmentalisation” had proven unsustainable within Iraq: the support given to the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Syria, from the mid-1970s onwards,⁴⁰ proved to be a crack in the militantly secular edifice of the early Ba’th regime that flooded the whole system. In 1986, Saddam’s foreign policy was formally reoriented to favour Islamists, and justifying this policy necessitated changes domestically, initially in symbolism and official messaging, then in substance.⁴¹ It does not especially matter whether Saddam was a true believer or was merely trying to co-opt the rising religious devotion to provide broader legitimacy for his ailing regime, the effect was the same.

Islam became omnipresent in Saddam’s Iraq. Scarce resources under sanctions were used to mass-construct mosques and madrassas, and create a class of carefully trained loyal ulema (scholars, clergy) and religious teachers; paid better than most civil servants and deputised in regime discourse as moral-political arbiters, the imams acquired a status in Iraqi life that outlived the regime. Islam was pervasive in the media and the dominant paradigm in education and the legal system, reshaping societal norms. “Atheism” was defined as the state’s opposite. The earlier valorisation of Iraq’s pre-Islamic history and identities, and figures like Nebuchadnezzar, was ended. Religious displays were incentivised as the path for promotion in the bureaucracy, army, and Party; those who excelled at the mandatory Qur’an lessons and most enthusiastically engaged in the prayers that regularly interrupted government meetings got ahead. Alongside the state promotion of Islam ideologically at every level, the shari’a was applied in practice: women were pushed out of government jobs and the hijab strongly encouraged; nightclubs were closed; alcohol and gambling were banned; “usury” was curbed and Islamic banking introduced; thieves had hands amputated; and prostitutes were “executed”, as were homosexuals, sometimes thrown from buildings, as IS would later do.⁴²

All of this habituated the population to Islamist patterns of rule, specifically looking to clerics for guidance, and reduced tensions between the government and Sunnis, both the Salafists and “ordinary” conservative Muslims, to such an extent many found it acceptable to serve in the state administration. The Faith Campaign backfired with the Shi’is, however: the ecumenical pretence, like pan-Arabism earlier, was seen, quite correctly, as cover for a pro-Sunni policy—in its allocation of resources and conceptual frameworks—and it hardened the anti-state and anti-Sunni edge to the Shi’a identity that formed in the aftermath of the merciless repression of the 1991 revolt.⁴³

The proof of the depth of the impact could be seen on “both sides” after 2003. The educated exiles who fled in the 1970s returned with the Americans, believing Iraq was well-placed for democratic transformation; the Iraq of their memory was a society where the middle-class, with its inter-sectarian marriages and secular outlook, was expanding, despite the escalating state brutality.⁴⁴ What they returned to was “a new country”, profoundly religious, with the mosque and ulema central to a communal life.⁴⁵ The middle-class had been eviscerated by war and sanctions, and, to the exiles’ immense shock, sectarian identities were strongly, overtly displayed.⁴⁶ On the other side, there was “no secular Sunni resistance at all”. The use of “nationalist” to describe any element of the insurgency was “a misnomer”.⁴⁷ “Ba’thists” freed from Saddam’s oversight in the insurgency after 2003 retained their Islamist orientation and did not return to the “hard” secularism the Ba’th Party brought into power in 1968.⁴⁸

There are scholars who argue that these changes in the last fifteen years of Saddam’s regime did not amount to “Islamization”, but even they concede the Faith Campaign involved an injection of Islam into a public square the Ba’thists had largely banished it from earlier,⁴⁹ which, as argued above, comes to the same thing. This argument is often made by those working closely with the Ba’thist archives, which are important but problematic if taken uncritically and in isolation. Saddam understood the danger of losing the Party by so radically altering course and, therefore, sought to present an internal picture of complete continuity between the hard-edged secularism of the 1970s and the Islamism of the 1990s. In some ways, the documents are the record of an elaborate deception operation within the Ba’th Party, rather than a true accounting of what the Party-state regime was doing. As Amatzia Baram has noted, “if the documents fail to mention some regime action, this does not mean that it did not happen. Likewise, … if the internal documents repeat the same claim hundreds of times … this is no proof that the claim is true. Rather, what it proves is that the regime desperately wanted party members to believe the claim.” The documents are fascinating primarily as a testament to the self-contained fantasy world Saddam’s totalitarianism created for the ruling Party in Iraq.⁵⁰

The aspect of the documents that has caused the most analytical confusion and rancour relates to the issue of the regime’s approach to Islam because if taken at face value “the files clearly indicate that the regime remained to the end suspicious of all religions and all religious activities”.⁵¹ When those making this argument present the evidence of the policy’s application, though, they demonstrate a selective repression of religious activities and a desire to direct religious sentiment towards regime legitimation.⁵² Take, for example, the hostility to “Wahhabists” in official discourse, both public and private. On the surface this suggests an antagonism to Wahhabism/Salafism. Delving deeper, however, it becomes clear the terminology is a political marker, used to refer to anti-regime Sunni Islamists and reflects the regime’s concern about a foreign state (Saudi Arabia) influencing the religious revival currents in Iraq, rather than an ideological concern per se. In this framework, the “Wahhabi” label was a useful way to accuse someone of disloyalty and extremism—of stepping outside the official bounds—without denigrating the idea of Islam’s role in public life.⁵³

Under Iran’s clerical regime, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made crystal clear that state interests and survival supersede the ordinances of Islam.⁵⁴ For Khomeini, this was no contradiction: the preservation of God’s state is the only means of securing even the possibility of implementing God’s law; the primary obligation is, therefore, to the state. Shi’a clerics can argue that this means the Islamic Republic is not “truly” Islamic, that a heretical wilayat al-faqih political ideology centred on a cult around the Imam has been elevated above the faith, but who seriously doubts that the Iranian regime is theocratic?

In the same way, Saddam tried to tie Islamic belief to the cult of personality around himself,⁵⁵ in effect creating a religious movement under his own leadership—call it Ba’thi-Salafism.⁵⁶ The repression of those elements that set themselves against Ba’thi-Salafism (i.e., the state) is thus licit, and has no impact—even theoretical—on the status of Islam as such.⁵⁷

The problem for Saddam’s view of the power structure under Ba’thi-Salafism was three-fold:

1. Saddam had “hammered the last nail into the coffin of [Ba’th] party ideology” no later than January 1995, so when intelligence officers were dispatched to mosques, supposedly to ensure the state remained in control of the religious upwelling, large numbers of these unmoored men found the Ba’thi-Salafist halfway house unstable and were seduced into the “pure” Salafi Trend, the underground current that held to Salafism without the Saddamism;⁵⁸

2. Partly as a result of the unreliable loyalty of so many in the intelligence system, in combination with the misery under the sanctions that both prevented rebuilding after the devastating defeat in Kuwait and swelled the ranks of the religious current, the state’s capacity to enforce its will was crumbling; and

3. Saddam saw the non-state Salafi Trend as a de facto ally in his project, albeit with the need to occasionally clip its wings by arresting or killing some of its members, since the main independent Islamist current Saddam feared—even as he cooperated with and co-opted parts of it—was the conspiratorial, transnational Muslim Brotherhood.⁵⁹

Some senior Ba’thist officials, surveying this picture, were convinced that if the trendlines continued the Salafi militants would overwhelm the regime, and were therefore deeply alarmed, as well they might have been: a “low-level terrorist campaign” against the regime began in “the late 1990s”,⁶⁰ and the first act of the jihadi-Salafist insurgency in Baghdad was on New Year’s Day 2000 with an attack outside a liquor store.⁶¹ It was in this underground Salafist milieu that Zarqawi found some of his most important lieutenants in 2002 as he set about building out his network in Iraq, among them: Abdurrahman al-Qaduli (Abu Ali al-Anbari), Wael al-Ta’i (Abu Muhammad al-Furqan), and Umar Hadid (Abu Khattab al-Falluji).

The Salafi Trend could not be curbed and the state could not be rebuilt overnight, the concerned Iraqi officials reasoned, so they focused on what seemed like the easiest variable: changing Saddam’s mind—having him recognise the independent Salafis as a menace, and allow the stretched available resources to be concentrated on reining them in, at least beginning by combing them out of the security apparatus. No dice. Cynical as the Faith Campaign might have been in origins, by the turn of the millennium there is every indication Saddam had turned to Islam for real, seeing his role in constructing a society of believers living under a version of shari’a and building mosques for them to worship in as his path to salvation.

CONSTRUCTING THE ZARQAWIST INSURGENCY IN SADDAM’S IRAQ AND THE SYRIA DIMENSION

Zarqawi’s exact movements over the summer and autumn of 2002 are somewhat unclear, but Zarqawi’s freedom of movement within Iraq,⁶² in what was otherwise a total police state, and the broad outline of these movements is very clear, confirmed from multiple directions: Zarqawi toured through Syria and Lebanon,⁶³ specifically the Ayn al-Hilwa Palestinian camp,⁶⁴ with the complicity of Bashar al-Asad’s Syrian regime, recruiting jihadists like Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) and setting up facilitation networks that would bring in further foreign fighters from the Arab world and Europe.

A flow of jihadists into Iraq from the “ratlines” set up in Syria had already begun over the summer of 2002, and, like Zarqawi and the Qaedaists who arrived months earlier, they were not hindered by Saddam. On the contrary, many of them received official visas from Saddam’s state, which was busy bussing in its own contingent of 5,000 Islamists from Syria, dubbed the “Mujahideen Battalion”,⁶⁵ adding them to the thousands of Arab jihadists already in training camps in Iraq since the late 1990s. These imported jihadists, the criminals released in the mass-amnesty in October 2002, and the Fedayeen Saddam, the personal militia that existed outside of the army structure and had been used (among other things) to implement Saddam’s version of shari’a, were virtually the only forces willing to defend Saddam as the Coalition drove up to Baghdad, notably using mosques and other religious sites as their operational headquarters.⁶⁶

While in Damascus, Zarqawi planned the assassination of Laurence Foley, the U.S. diplomat supervising the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Jordan, which took place in Amman on 28 October 2002. Zarqawi might even have made a trips to Jordan, where he was a most-wanted man, to oversee the “final details” of the plot.⁶⁷ Zarqawi was assisted in murdering Foley by the Asad regime, which took part in the planning, provided the logistics, and lent Zarqawi one of its jihadist assets, the Palestinian leader of Fatah al-Islam, Shaker al-Absi, to oversee the hit.⁶⁸ The Foley murder was only the most blatant example of a fact that is often overlooked, sometimes innocently and sometimes wilfully: “we cannot truly understand ISIS today”—its history and its rise—without examining “the agendas of regimes in Iran and Syria”.⁶⁹ The Zarqawist insurgency in Iraq would rely on Syrian state support up to 2011, and even when the IS movement ostensibly turned on its benefactor after that the story was a lot more complicated than it seemed.

Whether or not Zarqawi made trips to Jordan before Foley’s assassination, Zarqawi was not in Jordan when it was carried out. Zarqawi was likely back in Iraq in September 2002,⁷⁰ and is reported to have met several jihadists in Baghdad in October 2002. Once back in Iraq in late 2002, Zarqawi returned to Baghdad and appears to have then moved back into the Ansar al-Islam zone around November 2002. In late March 2003, for a second time, Zarqawi fled in the face of an American-led invasion into Iran. The signal for Zarqawi’s departure, with perhaps 600 fighters, was fifty American tomahawk cruise missiles destroying the camp in the village of Sargat, near Kurmal, the main training centre run by Ansar al-Islam in Iraqi Kurdistan, which was documented as a site where the jihadists had been messing around with chemical and biological weapons, and where Zarqawi had been the de facto authority from late 2001.⁷¹

Nibras Kazimi has highlighted, drawing on among other things Iraqi intelligence sources and jihadist testimonies, that there is some dispute about pieces of this narrative, suggesting Zarqawi came into Iraq from Kuwait. Zarqawi supposedly had an arduous journey, nearly suffocating as he was trapped for eight hours in an empty oil tanker across the scorching desert, being let out at Rutba and taking a taxi 250 miles to Baghdad. What is unclear is if these sources are referring to the first time Zarqawi entered Iraq, in April 2002, or the second time, in September 2002, after the Levantine recruitment and ratline-building tour, and in either case there are serious “issues”. There is conclusive evidence Zarqawi went into Iran in January 2002 alongside Al-Qaeda’s leadership and was given logistical and financial support by the clerical regime for his onward journey to Iraq.⁷² It is possible Zarqawi went from Iran to Kuwait and then Iraq—it would give the Iranians “deniability” if nothing else—but one might wonder at all this trouble when the Iran-Iraq border is so porous, and Zarqawi had Tehran’s complicity. Likewise, it is possible Zarqawi went from Jordan to Kuwait and then Iraq, but surely it would have been easier to go back through Syria, where, again, Zarqawi could rely on state collaboration. There is also an argument that Zarqawi never returned to Kurdistan in November 2002: this has some plausibility since it is agreed by all that the Americans were wrong in their belief that Zarqawi was present at the Sargat camp when it was demolished on 30 March 2003. Some reporting puts Zarqawi in Iran in February 2003 meeting Sayf al-Adel. Other reporting says Zarqawi “kept moving continually between Baghdad and the border area with Iran”,⁷³ which might well square the circle of these reports: it could mean Zarqawi did go to Kurdistan in November 2002—and then over the next four months spent some time in Baghdad and some time over the border in Iran.

What is clear from all this, though, is that there is no contest about the key data points on the timeline: the standard and “revisionist” accounts agree Zarqawi was in Baghdad in May 2002; agree that numerous other jihadists were converging on the city and connecting up with him throughout 2002; and agree that Zarqawi was able to leave Iraq and return during 2002.

ZARQAWI AND THE POST-SADDAM INSURGENCY

Five weeks before the invasion, Bin Laden said in public, “There is no harm … if the Muslims’ [i.e., jihadi-Salafists] interests coincide with those of the socialists [i.e., Ba’thists] in fighting the Crusaders”,⁷⁴ echoing a public statement of Saddam’s in December 2002.⁷⁵ Saddam’s regime was overthrown on 9 April 2003, and Zarqawi and the Ansar fighters began reinfiltrating Iraq from Iran no later than June 2003,⁷⁶ with assistance from Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri. The alliance of Ba’thi-Islamists and Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists forged before the invasion was deepening.

The fallen regime had aided Zarqawi in numerous ways, most obviously with the opportunities Saddam’s Islamization policies provided and the year Zarqawi had been given under Saddam’s roof to exploit them and prepare for the Americans’ arrival. Zarqawi had a pool of volunteers from Sunni society,⁷⁷ was able to recruit from the Salafi underground, and to enlist people with specialist skills from among the Salafized officers. Many of the Arab Islamist fighters Saddam openly imported before the war were killed in the fight for Baghdad or returned home demoralised at the speed of the regime’s dissolution,⁷⁸ but the remnant was picked up by Zarqawi and other insurgents. And Zarqawi had somehow come into possession of perhaps one-third of the billion dollars the regime removed from the Iraqi central bank on the literal eve of the invasion, enabling the jihadists to, among other things, hire sections of the tribal apparatus in western Iraq that had previously lived off Saddam’s cross-border sanctions-busting operations and were now in need of a new patron.⁷⁹

For all that Iraq in 2002-03 offered a more hospitable environment to jihadism than most suppose and perhaps than Zarqawi expected, however, it is crucial to understand that at this stage, and really up to late 2005, Zarqawi’s foreign-led network in Iraq was a small component of a Sunni insurgency dominated by Islamized former regime elements (FREs). The Zarqawists rigorously screened recruits, and those motivated by power considerations—restoring their own or more general Sunni revanchism—had a plethora of very powerful FRE-dominated insurgent units to choose from. The decision of senior regime officers like Samir al-Khlifawi (Haji Bakr) and Fadel al-Hiyali (Abu Mutaz al-Qurayshi or Abu Muslim al-Turkmani) to join the Zarqawists in this period can only have been made for ideological reasons. Most obviously, this shows how far Saddam’s own Islamization program penetrated the military-intelligence establishment, and the openings the program provided for the Salafi Trend. Al-Hiyali was converted to jihadism by Al-Qaduli in the late 1990s and began training the anti-regime jihadists, yet seems to have remained undetected and at his post until the end. It also shows how troublesome it is to use the term “Ba’thist” in describing the FREs in post-Saddam Iraq.

There is no question that the post-Saddam insurgencies are a legacy of the fallen regime and the social restructuring of its Faith Campaign.⁸⁰ Operationally, the initial insurgency evolved out of the preparations Saddam had made in late 2002, formalised in the “Emergency Plan” issued in January 2003, for the possibility that a limited American attack triggered a 1991-style internal rebellion that severed communication between the centre and provincial branches of the Party and army, who would have to work on their own to fight their way back to power.⁸¹ The main fear was the Shi’a population, and the possibility the Iranians would support their revolt. Incredible as it seems, to the very end Saddam saw Iran, not America, as his main threat: the Saddam regime ran an elaborate information operation to foster the idea it did have nuclear weapons, meant to deter Tehran, and Saddam was unconcerned that this might—as it had—convince the Americans, too, because he never believed anything worse than another round of airstrikes was coming from that direction. Whether or not some in the regime realised the reality of what the “Emergency Plan” training—in the sabotage of infrastructure and terrorist tactics like assassinating key opposition leaders—would be used for, it was these anti-uprising preparations, codenamed PROJECT 111, that laid the groundwork for a decentralised insurgency, by training a special cadre of one-thousand intelligence and military officers and paramilitaries from the Fedayeen Saddam who could lead effectively terrorist cells. These cells were to be capable of communicating with each other, forming a networked structure, while each cell could independently equip itself from secretly dispersed weapons stockpiles.⁸²

After the regime fell, there was an outbreak of what is often called “looting”. It was nothing of the kind. There was a popular spasm of theft, enabled by the U.S. sending too few troops, significantly based on the flabbergasting CIA assessment that the Iraqi police were seen by Iraqis as “professional” and would remain in position to assist with law and order, as would the Iraqi Army, which the Agency believed would remain intact and defect en masse. The reality, obviously, was that Baghdad’s 40,000 policemen evaporated and the Army disintegrated.⁸³ But the systematic stripping of heavy industrial equipment and sensitive weapons sites was a military operation undertaken as the regime withdrew from power.⁸⁴ These resources were used to outfit the insurgent infrastructure Saddam had created, which was lavishly funded with the treasury of the fallen regime via the Saddamist leadership across the border in Syria, who also provided the insurgency with strategic direction. The two principal leaders were Izzat al-Duri and his underling (and later rival) Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmad.⁸⁵

When the regime came down, there were between up to 95,000 FREs—Republican Guards, officers and analysts from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) or Mukhabarat (one branch of which was the secret police), the Fedayeen Saddam, Ba’th Party militiamen, and military officers—“who had gone to ground in and around Baghdad”.⁸⁶ Out of these a dozen major Ba’thi-Islamist groups quickly formed.⁸⁷ The earliest and best-known insurgent unit was Jaysh Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), formed at Saddam’s direction to restore his regime and comprised of soldiers from elite units, Ba’th Party elements, Fedayeen Saddam militiamen, remnants of the Mujahideen Battalion, and Saddam-loyal tribesmen. Jaysh Muhammad was led inside Iraq by a former Republican Guard Chief of Staff and closely overseen by Yunis: the strict organisational discipline provided by the FREs, the protection of the Syrian hinterland, and the funding and expertise for sophisticated propaganda enabled the group to expand rapidly in western and northern Iraq and Baghdad.⁸⁸ The leader of Jaysh al-Islami al-Iraqi (The Islamic Army of Iraq), Muhammad Kazem al-Janabi, a military-intelligence colonel, accepted funds from Al-Duri and picked up some of the Arab Islamists that Saddam had brought into Iraq, even as his Anbari tribes-based organisation set its sights on a “purer” Islamist regime than Saddam’s, made contact with Zarqawi, and attracted funds from Salafi donors on the Gulf.⁸⁹ Then there was Jaysh Umar, led by an IIS colonel, Khudair Abbas al-Ubaydi, and Kataib Thawrat al-Ishreen (The 1920 Revolution Brigade), which would come to prominence later.

Some of the insurgent groups had a more tribal character, and all of them were able to fill out their numbers with the tribal leaders and their kin who had been involved in the 1990s sanctions-busting networks (run by Al-Duri), as well as the criminals freed in the amnesty. The familial, tribal, and Islamist connective tissue of these organisations at the core of the insurgency made them difficult to infiltrate, even as they began adding “ordinary” Sunnis to their rosters.⁹⁰ Another factor shared across all streams of the insurgency in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, whether Iraqi—the Islamized FREs, Al-Duri’s Naqshbandi Sufis, Iraqi Salafis, and Saddam’s former tribal clientele—or the foreign-led Zarqawists: they could rely on money, weapons, and logistics from the exiled Ba’thist leadership in Syria.⁹¹ It was assumed by Al-Duri and Yunis that these groups could be used as cannon fodder for their restorationist program (their outfit was often called Hizb al-Awda or “Party of the Return”); they miscalculated.⁹²

When precisely the insurgency began remains a point of contention all these years later, though it is clear that the religiously conservative town of Fallujah in particular was seething by late May 2003, not least because of hysterical rumours that the Americans had binoculars that could see through people’s clothes, and that “by the end of June 2003, central Iraq appeared to be in the midst of a low-level, decentralised insurgency”.⁹³ Just as opaque is when Zarqawi switched the name of his organisation from Jund al-Sham to Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (JTJ), “the Group for Monotheism and Holy War”, though it does appear that the name change took place after Zarqawi moved to Iraq.⁹⁴

An insurgency was decisively underway in Iraq by August 2003: that month, JTJ—using supplies and know-how from operatives of the fallen regime—blew up the Jordanian Embassy (7 August); demolished the office of the United Nations and killed its envoy, Sérgio de Mello (19 August), and murdered the head of the radical Iranian-created Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, among 75 others, outside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf (29 August).⁹⁵ It is very noticeable that Saddam’s “Emergency Plan” named Al-Hakim as one of the Shi’a clerics to assassinate in the event of an internal crisis,⁹⁶ and that the man convicted (and ultimately executed) for actually planting the August 2003 bombs was Sami Muhammad Ali Said al-Jaaf (Abu Umar al-Kurdi), one of Zarqawi’s close associates, who had originally been in Ansar al-Islam.⁹⁷ Here were the two elements of the insurgency working in tandem already.

This was all made incomparably worse by having a formal, protracted occupation that came about unintentionally, after the fall of the Ba’thist edifice, and against an explicit pre-invasion plan not to have an occupation regime. This disastrous misdirection was rooted in the poisonous bureaucratic rift in the Bush administration, roughly pitting the State Department and the CIA against the Pentagon and elements around the Vice President’s office, sometimes (rather misleadingly) presented as “realists” versus “neoconservatives”. The occupation proposal was defeated in the interagency process, with the administration broadly settling on the Pentagon’s plan for a rapid a transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis (“liberation, not occupation”), and this was subverted in the field after the appointment of Paul Bremer as the senior U.S. civilian official in Baghdad. Amazingly, it was only in September 2003 that the Pentagon understood Bremer viewed himself as a Proconsul with eighteen months left on the clock. A timetable was quickly secured to shut down the occupation down, but it would still run for another ten months. In other words, a month after the insurgency had definitively begun, it was still not clear that the U.S. was going to run a prolonged occupation in Iraq. The result was catastrophic: because the actual policy of lengthy occupation was arrived at surreptitiously, it had to work with resources allocated for the much smaller and briefer agreed-upon official policy, producing the worst policy of all: a weak occupation, which now had the additional challenge of more active support than there needed to be from Sunni Arabs for the insurgency the regime remnants and the jihadists would always have run, since the occupation convinced many the U.S. intended colonisation and exploitation.

THE INSURGENCY INTENSIFIES

Through the autumn of 2003, the insurgency gained momentum as the money from Iraq’s looted treasury, held by Saddam’s deputy in Syria, drew in resentful Sunnis, and the weaponry taken in the regime’s final sweep was distributed. Overseen by the former intelligence and military officers, the insurgents began looking to acquire other capabilities. Parts of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) infrastructure Saddam never had started turning up in the hands of these forces, notably “Al-Abud Network”, an adjunct to Jaysh Muhammad, staffed by FREs who were believed at the time,⁹⁸ wrongly as it turned out, to be part of the Freemason-like “fraternity of Sufi military and intelligence officers” Al-Duri had fostered within the regime.⁹⁹ Thankfully the Abud Network was uncovered and neutralised before it could get too far in weaponizing the chemical weapons know-how and programs it had annexed from the fallen regime.¹⁰⁰

The ability of the insurgents to rocket the Rashid Hotel in one of the most fortified areas of Baghdad on 26 October 2003, while U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was there, was a grim indicator. The next day was the worst since Saddam’s fall: four suicide bombers attacked the Red Cross office in Baghdad, massacring three-dozen people and wounding two-hundred. Another would-be suicide-killer, arrested as he tried to attack a police station, had a Syrian passport. Some called it the beginning of a “Ramadan Offensive”, this being the first day of the Holy Month, and President Bush’s argument—that this was a sign of desperation as Iraq’s democratic transformation passed the insurgents by—landed with a thud. As November began, the shoot-down of a U.S. helicopter inflicted the worst single-day death toll on Coalition troops to that point, and the Italian army suffered its worst calamity since the Second World War when a suicide bomber struck its base in Nasiriya; it was quickly apparent this was the work of foreign jihadists with “Ba’thist” help.

The capture of Saddam Husayn on 13 December 2003 in Al-Dawr, twenty miles south of his birthplace in Tikrit, was important psychological victory—for the Americans, after the failure (because of bad CIA intelligence, again) of the decapitation strike that formally began the invasion,¹⁰¹ and for Iraqis, as an assurance that the old regime was not coming back. The practical influence on the insurgency was smaller. For one thing, since the collapse of the regime, the operational distinction between the Ba’thi-Salafists and the Salafi Trend had effectively dissolved. For another, Saddam was much more focused on remaining at liberty than micromanaging an insurgency, and the killing of his grisly son Uday in July 2003, alongside his brother Qusay, weakened Saddam’s connection with units that had been under the most personalistic control, like the Fedayeen Saddam.

That said, the sight of Saddam dragged meekly from his spider hole—“I am the president of Iraq and I am willing to negotiate”—after he had exhorted Iraqis to “martyrdom” against the invaders broke some of the spell he had over the minds of Iraqis, insurgents included. The contempt for this behaviour, and the reality that Saddam’s return was now impossible, turned many insurgents away from Saddam as the symbol of their struggle. In that sense the nature of the insurgency was altered by Saddam’s capture, though it should be said not all of it. The devotion to Saddam bred by decades of totalitarianism left some of the men behind the insurgency with no other identity: they were not fighting for a return of the Ba’th Party or even Sunni Arab hegemony; they wanted—and believed they could achieve—a restoration of Saddam himself.¹⁰² The spell did not break for these people until Saddam went to the gallows in December 2006.¹⁰³

Whether timed to capitalise on the spiritual vacuum for an insurgent figurehead after Saddam was taken off the chessboard, or simply because the jihadists had grown strong enough to announce themselves, Zarqawi made his first public speech on 4 January 2004, entitled “Join the Caravan” (Ilhaq bi-al-Qafila), a reference to Azzam’s famous call for jihad against the Soviets. Zarqawi called on Iraqis to join the jihad as a necessity to protect their honour and combat the enemies of the shari’a. A significant part of the speech was devoted to attacking the ulema in neighbouring countries for betraying the umma (Muslim community) by not supporting his cause. An interesting specific part of this criticism, given what happened later, was Zarqawi lambasting the ulema for insufficiently support to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Umar, whose “only sin was that he obeyed God and His Messenger”.¹⁰⁴

On 23 January 2004, the Coalition intercepted one of the most important documents of the Islamic State movement, a letter Zarqawi sent to Bin Laden, which was never intended to be public, laying out Zarqawi’s strategic vision to derail the American project in Iraq by “dragging [the Shi’is] into … sectarian war”, thereby forcing the “sleepy Sunnis” to awaken to the danger of annihilation at the hands of the Shi’a majority and rally behind the Zarqawists for protection. Showing that there was careful strategic logic in the targeting of JTJ’s tactically indiscriminate attacks, Zarqawi wrote: “Someone may say that … we are being hasty and rash and leading the umma into a battle … that will be revolting and in which blood will be spilled”, but “this is exactly what we want … God’s religion is more precious that lives and souls”. Notably, Zarqawi confessed that even with the occupation the new Iraqi police and army were gaining strength, becoming more confident in confronting the jihadists and stitching themselves into the fabric of Sunni society: “[This] is suffocation”, said Zarqawi, and if sectarian war was not ignited soon “we [will have to] pack our bags and search for another land”. Zarqawi’s insight was acute. While polarisation can be a precursor to mobilising violence for civil war, it generally is not. Once a society has been pushed into civil war, however, it creates polarisation and violent mobilisation.¹⁰⁵

As the U.S. drifted strategically, even in a military sense, over the next two months, insurgent violence steadily grew in intensity as the Zarqawists set about implementing their vision.¹⁰⁶ A very rare attack in the Kurdistan region, a twin suicide bombing on the headquarters of the Kurdish parties in Erbil, massacred one-hundred people and wounded another two-hundred-and-fifty on 1 February 2004. Attacks on the new Iraqi police forces Zarqawi so feared were becoming notable, especially in Mosul, a harbinger, and the targeting of Western diplomatic facilities continued with a grenade thrown at the Dutch Embassy. 2 March brought the most horrific atrocity so far, with one-hundred-and-fifty Iraqi Shi’is murdered in Baghdad and Karbala during the Ashura parade, an early attempt to start the sectarian civil war Zarqawi’s captured letter called for.¹⁰⁷ Churches and civilian infrastructure like hospitals came under greater assault.

Then all hell broke loose.

FALLUJAH FALLS TO THE ZARQAWISTS

Fallujah had been restive for months and a U.S. move against the city was thwarted by a Zarqawist raid on 20 March 2004, organised by Thamir al-Rishawi, one of the most senior FREs in JTJ at this time. On 31 March, amid rising chaos, four security contractors for Blackwater, protecting the food deliveries in Fallujah, were ambushed by Zarqawists, and the contractors’ bodies dragged through the streets by a mob, before two of their mutilated, charred corpses were hung up over a bridge. The city came under insurgent control.

The Ba’thi-Salafists, though more numerous in Fallujah and on the insurgent committee, Al-Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen (MSM), that ran the city, were also more disparate and disorganised. The bulk of JTJ’s senior leadership moved to Fallujah, though not Zarqawi at first, and quickly established supremacy. JTJ’s representative on the MSM and its military commander was Umar Hadid, a native of the city and one of the Salafis who way overstepped even Saddam’s boundaries by killing a member of the security forces in 1997, thereafter evading the state and joining the jihadist underground in the north.

Bremer catastrophically bungled the response, first by launching a rapid U.S. offensive that had to be called off on 9 April for political reasons—it was threatening to unravel the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and the process for transferring sovereignty—and then, at the end of April, sending an Iraqi force, led by a “former” Republican Guardsman who looked parodically like Saddam, which promptly defected to the insurgency.

As Zarqawi’s captured letter suggested, the jihadists had been struggling; they had little to show for a year of combat. The gamble on capturing territory in Fallujah paid off: for the next seven months, the Zarqawists would undertake their first attempt at governance that allowed time and space for training and the construction of more sophisticated car bombs, becoming a launchpad for mayhem all around Iraq. Zarqawi’s experiment in Fallujah remained an inspiration for the IS movement as its “caliphate” became a reality a decade later.

Seizing the moment, on 5 April 2004, Zarqawi issued his second audio statement, claiming responsibility for all of the IS movement’s terrorist acts to that point, including the three “spectaculars” of August 2003, the attack on the Italians in Nasiriya, the suicide-atrocity against Polish troops in Hilla on 18 February 2004, and the unmerciful slaughter of Shi’is on the Day of Ashura.¹⁰⁸

The first public announcement of JTJ’s existence was during Zarqawi’s third speech on 26 April 2004, which took responsibility for the 24 April attack on the oil industry in Basra and denied Jordan’s claim that a plot by the Zarqawists using chemical weapons had been prevented in Amman. “God knows that if we possessed … this kind of bomb, we would not hesitate for one moment to eagerly try to launch it at the cities of Israel, such as Eilat [and] Tel Aviv”, said Zarqawi.¹⁰⁹ Zarqawi would make public statements regularly after this.

ZARQAWI’S SYMBIOSIS WITH THE “SHI’A INSURGENCY”

Simultaneous with the Fallujah crisis, Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr began an offensive of his own centred on Sadr City (formerly Saddam City) in Baghdad and the shrine cities, Najaf and Karbala, in the south. Muqtada’s influence rests mostly on his family name: he is the son of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (“Sadr II”), regarded as more national-oriented because of his sometimes public contest with the Iranian clerical hierarchy, one of the leaders of the 1991 revolt who was assassinated (probably by Saddam, possibly by Iran) in February 1999, and the son-in-law of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (“Sadr I”), a distinctly more radical figure in the mould of Khomeini, who was appallingly tortured and slain in April 1980, after watching the rape and murder of his sister by Saddam’s Mukhabarat.¹¹⁰

The main source of Muqtada’s power was Iran, but his ability to say he had stayed in Iraq during the long night of Saddamism gave him a “nationalist” sheen that could not be claimed by more blatant instruments of the IRGC, like SCIRI and the Da’wa Party (which Sadr I had founded).¹¹¹ Since these two parties and other Shi’a leaders had—however grudgingly and/or duplicitously—joined the IGC and were cooperating with the U.S. to secure a transition to Iraqi sovereignty, Muqtada’s open opposition to the occupation allowed him to harness that section of Shi’a opinion. Ironically, Muqtada was partly here benefiting from the Saddam regime that had kept him in check: the “anti-imperialist” and deeply anti-American religio-political themes Muqtada employed had been embedded in the permissible Shi’i discourse and clerical landscape that Saddam had shaped under the Faith Campaign.¹¹²

Muqtada, a very junior cleric when Saddam fell and reportedly more interested in video games than Islam (gaining him the nickname “Mullah Atari”), had visited Iran in May 2003, where he had been given the imprimatur of religious authority by Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, a pupil of Sadr II’s and the ideological successor of Sadr I, and met with Sulaymani. IRGC officers were embedded in the Sadrist Movement and its Jaysh al-Mahdi (“Mahdi Army” or JAI) ever-afterwards.¹¹³ The IRGC cultivated much of its infrastructure within Iraq from the Badr Corps, which Tehran had created during the Iran-Iraq War and used to wage a shadow war against Saddam in the 1990s,¹¹⁴ but some of the worst “Special Groups”, as the IRGC’s Shi’a militias that killed countless civilians and hundreds of Western troops became known, were spun off from Muqtada’s loose network.

Muqtada was a known problem by the spring of 2004. The Sadrists had staged a minor uprising in August 2003 and begun escalating clashes with the Coalition from January 2004.¹¹⁵ Then there was the outstanding arrest warrant, issued for Muqtada in November 2003 after witnesses came forward to attest to what everyone in Iraq knew: Muqtada had, the day after Baghdad fell, ordered the murder of Abd al-Majid al-Khoe’i, a popular and respected cleric, son of Iraq’s most senior Grand Ayatollah until his death in 1992, Abu al-Qasim al-Khoe’i. Sadr saw Abd al-Majid as too close to the West.¹¹⁶ Bremer had hesitated for months and was still dithering over the warrant itself when he gave the order, on 28 March 2004, to close down Muqtada’s newspaper, Al-Hawza, for sixty days for inciting violence.¹¹⁷ A week later, 4 April, Muqtada orchestrated protests in Najaf and JAI militiamen fired from among the crowd, killing two Coalition soldiers and injuring nine, creating a melee that ultimately killed twenty people and wounded one-hundred. Serious fighting between the Coalition and the Sadrists in the capital and the shrine cities dragged on for eight weeks until Muqtada announced a ceasefire on 6 June.

Muqtada opening a second front made it militarily and politically more difficult to focus on Fallujah, and the Zarqawists took full advantage. A video was released on 11 May 2004 showing the beheading of American radio-repair contractor Nicholas Berg, the first such horror. Prior to Berg’s murder, which Zarqawi carried out personally, the JTJ leader made a short speech trying to exploit the misbehaviour of American military police at Abu Ghraib (revealed on 18 April), condemning Muslims engaged in politics and peaceful protests, saying jihad and an Islamic state were the only answers, and inciting the overthrow of Pakistan’s military autocrat, General Pervez Musharraf.¹¹⁸

Muqtada had sought to portray to his actions as coordinated with the “Sunni resistance” to emphasise his “nationalist” pretentions,¹¹⁹ and the insurgents in Fallujah had reaped operational benefits from the Muqtada imbroglio. Zarqawi did not return the sentiment, casting the Sadrists as another tool in the U.S. arsenal to empower Iran-loyal Shi’a sectarians and repress Sunnis. Dangerously, this narrative had a significant element of truth.

The “militiaficiation” of Iraq’s state that is now so apparent was present from early on, with political leaders doing “politics in the daytime and terrorism at night”. Sunnis were not innocent of this: the nascent insurgency was able to draw on sympathisers and spies in the civil service and other undisturbed parts of the old order that survived, and especially after 2005, when the Sunni Arab official leadership became more representative of its constituency, many MPs had one foot in the government and the other in the insurgency. But by sheer demography and because of Iran, it was a bigger problem on the Shi’a side.

After a decade of subversive activities, Iran was well-placed when Baghdad fell to begin implementing its Islamic Revolution model, which proceeds by simultaneously capturing power-centres in the state and building up parallel structures that overshadow the formal state: the IRGC in Iran, Hizballah in Lebanon, the Huthis in Yemen. In Iraq, Badr and its replicates emerged from the underground, using IRGC kill lists and money combined with weapons looted from Iraqi stores to eliminate local elites and take power in various towns,¹²⁰ while at the centre Badr captured the Interior Ministry, meaning it could reflag some of its cadres as part of the new Iraqi security forces (ISF), particularly the Special Police,¹²¹ and more broadly construct a “deep state” that put the fragile new ISF in its shadow. Political cover for this was provided by the main Shi’a parties dominating the new government, which were linked to the IRGC network, a network thickened over time as it annexed the most efficacious segments of the Sadrist Trend to itself.¹²²

The November 2005 discovery of the Jadriya bunker in Baghdad, one of Badr’s unofficial prisons, where 169 people (166 of them Sunnis) had been held without official paperwork and tortured, became a potent short-hand reference for the idea the “New” Iraq was an American-Iranian conspiracy against Sunnis. The subsequent investigation found, and made public knowledge, that Jadriya was merely one such facility in an off-the-books infrastructure of “disappearances”, torture, and murder being run out of the Interior Ministry with the knowledge of the Prime Minister. As such, it was simply true that anti-Sunni sectarianism had been institutionalised in the new government—and the U.S. did little to curb it, even after these revelations.¹²³ The involvement of the “Special Groups” wearing ISF uniforms in the sectarian bloodletting after the Zarqawists blew up the Askari Mosque in February 2006 reinforced the Sunni rejectionist argument that there was no way to come to terms with the Shi’a-led government and the Coalition. When America allied with Iran against the IS movement after 2014, under the cover of which Iran’s militias were formalised as part of the Iraqi state and horrendous abuses of the Iraqi Sunni Arab population took place, the Zarqawists could not have asked for more: here in the open was what was Zarqawi had said all along.

ZARQAWI TAKES CENTRE STAGE

The U.S. publicised Zarqawi’s letter laying out his strategic plan to push Iraq into a sectarian abyss as part of an information operation to discredit the insurgency, and in early February 2004 the U.S. raised the reward of $5 million for Zarqawi’s apprehension offered five months earlier to $10 million. Unfortunately, this was about the extent of the response: with the exception of U.S. Special Operations Forces, this incredible intelligence victory—the discovery of the enemy’s war plan—had little effect on U.S. policy.¹²⁴ The American bureaucracy remained too consumed by people searching after interests within institutions (their departments), rather than guarding the interests of the institution (the U.S. government), to coordinate a coherent long-term strategic vision that would include things like prioritising preventing civil war in Iraq.¹²⁵ Much the same was true of Iraqis in the political elite, more concerned with fighting each other than the jihadists.

In contrast, Zarqawi and his successors (and Iran) never failed to keep the main thing the main thing. As Craig Whiteside has written, the Islamic State movement has “achieved what many organisations struggle to achieve, by developing a core of humans who think enough alike that policy making and strategy execution become much simpler”. This is what made the criticism of the U.S. for overhyping Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency so misplaced. History in general is driven by minorities, and a cohesive minority fired by a sense of godly mission can go very far indeed (the Jesuits are a classic case). In a situation of civil war and insurgency, this is even more true.¹²⁶ Zarqawi had first come to global attention during Colin Powell’s infamous speech to the United Nations in February 2003. In what was otherwise a dreadful presentation, Powell’s recognition of the danger Zarqawi posed from his perch in Iraq stands out as prescient.¹²⁷ By the time the U.S. raised the bounty on Zarqawi to $25 million, the same amount offered for Bin Laden, on 1 July 2004,¹²⁸ this was a concession to reality, not an effort to shape it.

Entrenched in Fallujah, Zarqawi stepped up his attempt to control the narrative of the war. A statement signed by Zarqawi (and Abu Dajana al-Iraqi) was posted on an Islamist website on 13 May, announcing a merger of JTJ with another jihadist group, Jamaa al-Salafiyya al-Mujahideen fi al-Iraq (The Salafi Group of Holy Warriors in Iraq). This was just one of the data points showing JTJ’s dominance—out of all proportion to its numbers—in Fallujah.

A brief martyrdom notice was issued by Zarqawi for a Kuwaiti foreign fighter, Faysal al-Mutayri (Abu al-Bara), on 17 June.¹²⁹ And on 19 June, Zarqawi gave a speech focused on JTJ’s then-military emir, Abu Muhammad al-Lubnani, a Lebanese jihadist whose real name was Mustafa Ramadan Darwish, and the theme of jihadist crying: weeping is, it seems, acceptable as a means of displaying devotion to God and to jihadist “brothers”, especially those who get taken into infidel captivity like Darwish’s companion “Abu Abdallah al-Rawi” (likely Manaf al-Rawi).¹³⁰

As the date for the transfer of power approached, Zarqawi threatened the designated interim Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi (r. June 2004-May 2005), in an audio message released on 23 June, saying Allawi would go the way of Ezzedine Salim, the Islamist ideologue and Da’wa Party member who was president of the IGC when he was assassinated on 17 May.

Bremer left Iraq on 28 June 2004 and sovereignty was formally transferred to Allawi’s government. The proponents of an extended occupation, who got their way by hook or by crook, had premised their argument on the need for stability. After fourteen months, an occupation that began with minimal organised violence left behind a raging Sunni Islamist insurgency and the Muqtada problem it had avoided tackling when it was manageable. The other premise of the occupation had been to create a framework for politics moving forward. Essentially nothing Bremer did stuck; all the work of restarting Iraqi politics after it was terminated three decades earlier was still to do.

Allawi’s demeanour was that of a strongman and his promise was of order. Such a posture endeared Allawi to the State Department and especially to the CIA and the British establishment, who had never really been sold on Iraqi democracy. Allawi certainly tried to rule in this way, without much success, reflected in the failure of Allawi’s various efforts to crack down on disorder over subsequent months and his poor showing when Iraqis finally went to the polls in January 2005.

Zarqawi’s first post-formal-occupation statement, a sixty-minute audio message released on 5 July, defended the hideous methods JTJ was using, specifically the video butchery, presenting these tactics as inter alia a way of resisting a conspiracy to convert the country to Christianity. This framing was also used to attack Sunnis opposed to the Zarqawists, naming Harith al-Dhari,¹³¹ the Sunni imam in charge of the Association of Muslim Scholars (Hay’at al-Ulema al-Muslimeen), an important body bringing together many of the clerical graduates of the Faith Campaign.¹³² Al-Dhari had condemned Zarqawi beheading the South Korean Christian missionary Kim Sun-il a few weeks earlier.

Zarqawi made a speech on 23 July comparing the Iraqi interim authorities to the Hamid Karzai government in Afghanistan, accusing both of being instruments of American indirect colonialism and therefore illegitimate, unlike the jihadists then-occupying Fallujah. Among other things, in this speech Zarqawi claimed Colin Powell had admitted to a Jewish group that Saddam was taken out to remove a threat to Israel and Moshe Dayan was allegedly quoted to the effect that Israeli policy was finding Arab leaders that protected Israel’s borders, of whom Allawi was one. Allawi was threatened with Salim’s fate again.¹³³

An hour-long video clip package, “Winds of Victory”, was released on 8 August, put together by the first official spokesman of the IS movement and deputy of its media department, Abu Maysara al-Iraqi. The video was sprinkled with speech from Zarqawi, explaining JTJ’s program, and among other things included a line that would become famous, “We fight in Iraq, but our eyes are upon Jerusalem” (Nuqatil fi al-Iraq wa-‘uyununa ‘ala Bayt al-Maqdis).¹³⁴

Muqtada’s JAI attacked Iraqi police in Najaf on 5 August and the fighting turned into a month-long stand-off in the Imam Ali Mosque. Muqtada withdrew his forces on 27 August, but the price for the Coalition was high, in lives and politically. The episode exposed the inefficacy of Allawi’s clumsy authoritarianism and the intercession of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the de facto most important political authority in the country, had resulted in the usually fissiparous Shi’a Islamists closing ranks, and including Muqtada, whom they otherwise despised, within this unity.¹³⁵ The drubbing the Sadrists received in the two rounds in 2004 greatly benefited Iran. Needing assistance to rebuild, and training to carry out covert warfare, having learned the cost of direct confrontation with American and British troops, Sulaymani was asked for help: this gave the Quds Force commander vast influence over the whole Sadrist movement, and an opening to talent-spot and recruit capable Sadrist military leaders, creating further nodes to expand the IRGC network in a process “reminiscent of cell replication”. Sulaymani was helped in this because Muqtada’s outreach to the Iranians had in itself caused fractures in the Sadrist movement.¹³⁶ The other main beneficiary of the Muqtada-Coalition fighting was the Zarqawists, since after the second round it was clear the Allawi government was in no position to handle the Fallujah problem, and the U.S. was not going to try again before the 2 November Presidential Election.¹³⁷

Zarqawi released an 11 September speech that focused on JTJ’s enemies, dividing them into three categories: the Americans; the Kurds, both Masud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), whose Peshmerga were accused of being staffed by “Jewish military cadres” (i.e. Israelis); and “the Rafida” (Shi’is), particularly the Badr Corps and the Da’wa Party, for whom Allawi was said to be a puppet.¹³⁸

JTJ abducted two Americans, Jack Hensley and Eugene “Jack” Armstrong, and a British subject, Ken Bigley, on 16 September. The three hostages were construction contractors with a U.A.E. firm, Gulf Supplies Commercial Services. JTJ had demanded the release of all Iraqi women prisoners from the Umm Qasr and Abu Ghraib prisons on 18 September, giving the Coalition forty-eight hours. The Coalition made clear it held no women at these prisons. In a video released on 20 September, Zarqawi beheaded Jack Armstrong, and threatened to behead Bigley if the U.S. did not release all the female prisoners within twenty-four hours.¹³⁹ Hensley was decapitated on video on 21 September. Bigley was slaughtered the same way on 7 October and the tape released the next day.

Zarqawi eulogised his deputy and the chief shar’i (religious and judicial official) of JTJ, Abu Anas al-Shami, a Kuwaiti national whose real name was Umar Yusef al-Juma, on 26 September 2004. Abu Anas—killed about ten days earlier in Abu Ghraib—was presented as a “knight of Islam” and a scholar by Zarqawi,¹⁴⁰ the model of the scholar-warrior the IS movement valorises so much, and whose activities are used to reproach jihadi clerics like Al-Maqdisi who criticise IS without getting involved in fighting.

ZARQAWI PLEDGES ALLEGIANCE TO AL-QAEDA

Assuming none of Zarqawi’s statements have been missed, it makes the 17 October 2004 bay’a to Bin Laden the fifteenth statement from Zarqawi. The bay’a is a written statement, not an audio release. And, though Zarqawi’s name is on bay’a declaration, it is there as the leader of JTJ. Since the text of the pledge also mentions Zarqawi—albeit it is not that unusual for jihadists to refer to themselves in the third person—it seems more like an organisational release, than one in Zarqawi’s voice per se.

There can be no doubt that Fallujah was a crucial piece of the context for Zarqawi pledging allegiance to Bin Laden when he did after eight months of negotiations. By holding Fallujah in defiance of American efforts to retake it, the stature of Zarqawi and JTJ were being raised—throughout the country, the region, and indeed the world. Among the practical benefits of having an “Islamic emirate” was that Zarqawi could reinforce his prestige with more and better media. Bin Laden was capitalising on Zarqawi’s rising star, ensuring that when the decisive showdown with the Americans over Fallujah arrived JTJ would go into battle as a branch of Al-Qaeda.

The bay’a that brought JTJ under Al-Qaeda’s banner reads:

In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful.

Praise be to God, who has united the ranks of the mujahideen and scattered the infidels [or unbelievers: “al-kafireen”]. Praise be to God who said: “Hold fast, all of you together, to the rope of God [i.e., the Qur’an] and be not be divided among yourselves” [Qur’an 3:103]. Blessings and peace be upon the believers whose hearts have been united by God, so that they can stand like a solid structure in the face of the enemies of the deen [i.e., Islam], severe against infidels, merciful among themselves, and exalt God and His Companions, who raised the sword of truth and struck off the heads of falsehood.

As for what follows:

There were numerous communications between Shaykh Abu Musab [al-Zarqawi], may God preserve him, and the brothers in Al-Qaeda over the last eight months, during [which points] of view were exchanged. It was fated for there to be an interruption, but God soon restored communications, allowing our honourable brothers in Al-Qaeda to understand the strategy of Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad [operating in] the land between the two rivers, the land of the Caliphs, and their breasts were opened to its manhaj [methodology, approach].

With the advent of the month of Ramadan, the month of giving and victories, and in circumstances where Muslims are most in need of unity to put out the eyes of the enemies of the deen, we will sacrifice for our glorious umma [(Islamic) community], the best umma ever brought forth, to bring glad tidings that cause the believers to rejoice, the infidels to die in their rage, and terrifies every enemy of the Muslims.

We bring news of the bay’a of Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad—its emir and its soldiers—to the shaykh of the mujahideen, Usama bin Laden, to listen and obey, energetically waging jihad for the sake of God until there is no more fitna [strife, discord] and the deen is all for God.

We have heard the saying of our Prophet, in whom we believe and trust, “This world will not end until it belongs to Luka bin Luka”, and we have seen the absurdity of today’s heads of government.

And we are awaiting his other promise, which is expected among the emirs: “It—that is, Prophethood—shall remain among you for as long as God wills it, and will be taken away when He so wills it. Next will be a caliphate upon the Prophetic methodology, remaining with you for as long as God wills it, and will be taken away when He so wills it. A mordacious King will follow,¹⁴¹ and his [unjust] rule will remain among you for as long as God wills it, and will be taken away when He so wills it. Then [at last], there will be a caliphate on the Prophetic methodology.” May it be that this [situation] falls into our hands.

By God, O Shaykh of the Mujahideen, if you were to plunge into the sea, we would follow you—God willing—and if you were to command it [of us], we would obey. If you forbade [something], we will cease it, for you are the commander of the armies of Islam against the infidels, the main [ones] and the apostates.¹⁴²

So then, youth of the umma, [rally] to the flag of the Shaykh of the Mujahideen, as we raise together the cry: “La illah ila Allah [There is no god but God]”. Beneath the flag raised as by our heroic ancestors, let us purify the lands of Islam from every infidel and sinful apostate until Islam enters the home of every urbanite and nomad.¹⁴³

Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad,

Led by the emir, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,

Promulgated on Sunday, 3 Ramadan 1425 [17 October 2004]

The format for merging the Zarqawist vision with Al-Qaeda, worked out in 2004, was reflected a pamphlet ostensibly transmitted by Sayf al-Adel from Iran to Fuad Husayn, a “journalist” in Jordan imprisoned with Zarqawi and Al-Maqdisi in 1994, who published it in a book in 2005. The task was to combine Al-Qaeda’s long-term strategy of prioritising war with the U.S., to drive it out of the Middle East so the regional governments would be left vulnerable to Islamist revolutions and gradually combining the resulting emirates into a caliphate on a deliberately indeterminate timescale, with Zarqawi’s aggressive determination to challenge regional states in the short-term and acquire territory that could be expanded into a caliphate.

In squaring this circle, the “master plan”, as some overwroughtly call the document Al-Adel sent to Husayn, proposed using the direct jihadist confrontation with the U.S. in Iraq as a way of drawing Muslims to Al-Qaeda, of weakening regional governments by showing their alliance with the U.S. (and Israel), and—as would become so important—identified Syria as what Brian Fishman calls a “geopolitical loophole” in Al-Qaeda’s traditional thinking: it was, like Saddam’s Iraq, an anti-American regime that would not be able to rely on superpower protection if challenged by jihadists. This was a shortcut to the caliphate, and an “all-out confrontation” with “the forces of atheism” that would—following Zarqawi’s logic of dragging Iraqi Sunnis into a sectarian war with the Shi’a—force Muslims to side with the jihadists against the West. The “master plan” is an interesting framework that some jihadists did take up in judging the progress of the IS movement, and its timetable for the stages toward a caliphate aligns remarkably with what happened, albeit probably coincidentally.¹⁴⁴ But there is no evidence the “master plan” was used as a guide for decision-making, and Bin Laden does not seem to have seen it until much later. When Bin Laden did see it, he doubted Sayf was the author, detecting the hand of Iranian intelligence.

If the “master plan” reflected what the IS movement was doing, another book published in 2004 set out how it would do it. The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji was a much more granular work, taking classic concepts about how to transition from insurgency to state-building and Islamizing them, giving theological sanction to such tactics and adapting them for application in Muslim states. Naji’s advice on leadership, ideological and military training, and how to manage populations echoed Mao Zedong. Naji’s fundamental proposal was to collapse states into war, use extreme and large-scale violence to create terror and demolish all political and social structures, fully accepting the targeting of civilians as part of this, creating a situation where upholders of the previous order have been destroyed and the population has to take up arms and look to the jihadists for protection. Once total anarchy—“regions of savagery”—had been achieved, Naji instructed how to offer the Islamic state to people yearning for order. In this, Naji sounded much more like Vladimir Lenin than a jihadist.

“Naji” is believed to be Muhammad Khalil al-Hakaymah, an Egyptian jihadist who went to Iran with Zarqawi and Sayf in 2002. Like Sayf, Al-Hakaymah had a pre-9/11 relationship with the clerical regime.¹⁴⁵ It is interesting that these two most famous strategic works of the IS movement, however much their importance has been exaggerated, were written by men so close to the IRGC and in its nominal custody.

AL-QAEDA ACCEPTS ZARQAWI’S PLEDGE

The U.S. began Operation PHANTOM FURY to retake Fallujah on 7 November, soon renamed Operation DAWN. The Zarqawists adhered to a formula that lasts to this day of avoiding full-scale combat with an overwhelming enemy in an urban area (Kobani is the great exception), leaving “a skeleton crew of snipers and suicide bombers, behind a defensive perimeter of mines and booby-trapped buildings, inflicting maximum casualties on its foes”, and using the battle to score political victories that are more lasting than military defeats. The Zarqawist force-preservation tactics contrasted sharply with the Ba’thi-Salafists, who took heavy and in some cases decisive losses in Fallujah, altering the balance of power within the insurgency.¹⁴⁶

The major combat in Fallujah was over in a week and the mopping up a week after that. The Zarqawists had already shifted ground, however: many jihadists moved out of Fallujah, into areas of western Anbar and the “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad where they would cause so much trouble in succeeding months, and the JTJ leadership decamped on 8 November for Mosul, causing a week of violence that temporarily overwhelmed the small Coalition garrison.¹⁴⁷ Mosul became the movement’s centre of gravity thereafter. The IS movement was so powerful in Mosul that it was never fully cleared, even at the height of the “Surge” in 2007-08. There was no “Awakening” in the area, and the jihadists’ shadow governance structures burst into the light in 2014 when Mosul was transformed into one of the twin “capitals” (Raqqa was the other) of the “caliphate”.

The victory was a pyrrhic one for the Americans. The speed of Fallujah’s recapture and the jihadist house of horrors the U.S. Marines found could not outweigh what the Zarqawists gained. Governing a city let the Zarqawists test their concepts and gain practical experience in how to integrate their project with local populations, as well as managing—and co-opting—other insurgent groups. Key in this was having Hadid front the enterprise and keeping alive the story of his “martyrdom”. The massive destruction of property, especially mosques the jihadists had used as battle stations, was successfully used by the Zarqawists to portray the Fallujah operation as an atrocity, fuelling Sunni Arab hostility to the Coalition. Finally, there was the global attention for Zarqawi’s men, which raised their stature. Within Iraq, this helped the Zarqawists co-opt the insurgency over the next year.¹⁴⁸ Outside Iraq, it quieted doubts within Al-Qaeda about embracing JTJ.

On 27 December 2004, four days after the official end of the DAWN operation was announced, Usama bin Laden released an audio tape via Al-Jazeera formally accepting Zarqawi’s bay’a.

Bin Laden began by praising Zarqawi’s terrorist campaign in Iraq: “We were pleased with their daring [or bold: jareeya] operations against the Americans and Allawi’s apostate government.”

“All should know that the mujahid brother Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the emir of Tanzim al-Qaeda fi Bilad al-Rafidayn. The brothers in the group [al-jama’a] there should heed him and obey him in all that is good”, Bin Laden said. “Tanzim al-Qaeda fi Bilad al-Rafidayn” (The Base [of Jihad] Group in the Land Between the two Rivers) is the formal name of the Islamic State movement from October 2004 to November 2006, and is usually rendered in English as “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” (AQM) or “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” (AQI).

Bin Laden went on: “We, in Tanzim al-Qaeda, warmly welcome their [JTJ’s] union with us. This is a great step on the path [tariq] of unifying the efforts of the mujahideen towards establishing the state of truth [dawla al-haq] and annihilating the state of falsehood [dawla al-batil].”

At the time of Bin Laden’s audio release, the first elections in post-Saddam Iraq were a month away, scheduled for 30 January 2005. There was serious concern that the Zarqawists would be able to intimidate people away from voting or directly disrupt the election through violence. (Three weeks later, Zarqawi would release an audio statement on 23 January 2005 declaring “a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy” and threatening to murder both candidates and voters.)

Bin Laden encouraged the Zarqawists in this approach:

As is known, the constitution [dustur] that was imposed by the American occupier [Proconsul Paul] Bremer is a jahili, man-made constitution, where it is insisted that Islam should not be the sole source of legislation.

Therefore, if we suppose—for the sake of argument—that ninety percent of the laws and rulings come from the Islamic shari’a, and ten percent from man-made legislation, then this constitution is still considered, in the scales [meezan] of Islam, an infidel constitution.

Based on this, anyone who participates in the elections becomes a disbeliever in God Almighty, and there is no power or strength except in God. We should beware of the charlatans [or imposters: “al-dajaleen”] who speak in the name of Islamic parties and groups, and urge people to participate in this apostasy.

CONCLUSION

When Zarqawi moved to Iraq in the spring of 2002, he evidently saw opportunities outsiders did not—just as the Islamic State later did in Syria.¹⁴⁹ The remaking of Iraqi society over the prior fifteen years was clearly one such opportunity: Saddam’s Islamization program had fostered and normalised Salafist precepts among the population and heightened sectarian tensions, and the parallel policies to evade the sanctions had, by commission and omission, empowered co-optable elements, namely local imams, the tribes, and the underground Salafi Trend that had begun moving to direct confrontation with the Saddam regime at the turn of the millennium and forging links with what looks like a regional “supra-network” of jihadi-Salafists that was, so to say, “non-partisan”, facilitating and funding “any jihadist who came armed with references”.

Zarqawi must have understood, too, that he would not only be able to draw on these indirect fruits of Saddam’s regime, but would not face too much trouble from the Iraqi regime’s remaining repressive capacity, even in its capital. The inclination to ascribe Zarqawi’s freedom of action in Iraq to negligence, with Saddam having the more pressing concern of the Americans, cannot survive scrutiny. First and most obviously, Saddam did not believe the American build-up presaged his demise. To the contrary, the foreign threat Saddam saw was Iran and the primary concern to the very end was internal security challenges. Second and relatedly, after the Jordanians told Saddam that Zarqawi was in Iraq and what he was doing—twice—the regime arrested some of Zarqawi’s people, only to let them go.¹⁵⁰ This does not suggest the Zarqawists ranked high on Saddam’s list of security threats. Third, Zarqawi was not entering Iraq blind. There are indications a non-aggression pact was reached between Saddam and Bin Laden in the months after the August 1998 attacks on the U.S. Embassies in East Africa,¹⁵¹ during a period of visibly increased interaction between the two sides. Saddam’s high-level contacts with Al-Qaeda went back to 1992; cooperation on terrorist training and offers of safe-haven were key points in the Saddam-Qaeda discussions thereafter.¹⁵² When Bin Laden was thinking of leaving Afghanistan in early 1999, amid pressures from the Taliban, it was to Iraq he was considering departing,¹⁵³ and Ansar al-Islam’s jihadist mini-state, where Zarqawi seems to have first set foot on Iraqi soil, was at least tolerated by Saddam. In this context, Zarqawi had reasonable grounds to expect indulgence for his mission from the Saddam regime.

The issue of state relations with international terrorist groups continues to loom very large, albeit not in most terrorism analysis. With Al-Qaeda, the issue goes right back to the beginning. There is a definitional problem with describing Al-Qaeda as a “non-state actor”: it was an integral part of the state in Sudan up to 1996, and, in Afghanistan up to 2001, Al-Qaeda was bound to the Taliban, an instrument of Pakistan’s deep state.¹⁵⁴ Then there is the extensive state support Al-Qaeda drew upon, from sections of the Saudi establishment before 9/11, from Saddam’s Iraq, and most importantly from Clerical Iran, which reached a direct compact with Bin Laden in 1992, began training Al-Qaeda jihadists in Hizballah camps in Lebanon soon after, and supplied various kinds of support in Bosnia that helped Al-Qaeda go truly global. The military-terrorism capacities Iran transferred to Al-Qaeda were important in the group becoming capable of its “spectaculars”, specifically the East African Embassies bombing in 1998, modelled on the Hizballah/IRGC massacre of the U.S. and French Marines in Beirut in 1983. Several key Al-Qaeda officials responsible for that atrocity were trained by Iran. One was Sayf al-Adel,¹⁵⁵ the man Zarqawi first met in Afghanistan, the instrumental figure in bringing Zarqawi into Al-Qaeda’s orbit, who is at the present time believed to be Al-Qaeda’s de facto leader, sheltered in Tehran,¹⁵⁶ out of political reach of Western drones.

The assistance Iran provided to Zarqawi as he prepared to implant the Islamic State movement in Iraq and the various ways Iran abetted the Zarqawists during the U.S. regency phase in Iraq was, therefore, not aberrational, nor the de facto Iranian collaboration with IS to destroy any Western-engageable components of the Syrian rebellion. It was IS that decisively repudiated Iran, partly so it can use Al-Qaeda’s consistent advice against targeting the “Shi’a” power as a polemical weapon, but that does not erase the role Iran has played in building IS up. IS will remain a threat to the West for some time, and Iran played a part in making that happen. Likewise, the strategic-ideological vision that drove Iran’s approach to IS remains with us.

The Khomeinist clergy never intended their Revolution to be sectarian. As one incisive observer has noted, among the first things the revolutionary clergy did after prevailing was to establish an “Islamic Comintern”: the captured oil wealth of Iran and the spy-terrorist apparatus of the Islamic Republic would be at the service of any anti-Western militants—Sunni, Shi’a, or otherwise. Al-Qaeda’s emir from May 2011 until July 2022, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was “Iran’s favourite Sunni jihadist poster boy” throughout the 1980s and retained these relations down to the end. With Al-Zawahiri’s probable successor in Tehran, Iran’s hold over Al-Qaeda “central” (AQC) is now much more powerful—and in various theatres around the world, from Somalia to Afghanistan, Iran has made steady inroads with Al-Qaeda’s “affiliates”. Much of the Muslim Brotherhood has close relations with Iran and none closer than the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, HAMAS, while Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is just a straight-out IRGC front.

Zarqawi would spend just under eighteen months as Al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq. The arrangement was a rather unequal one. It opened up Al-Qaeda’s finance networks to the Zarqawists and gave them greater “brand recognition”. One way this strengthened the Zarqawists was allowing them to bring—with the complicity of the Asad regime—a flood of foreign suicide bombers into Iraq. Meanwhile, Fallujah and subsequent operations had gravely debilitated other insurgent groups and encouraged quite a number of hardline Sunni Arabs to begin entering the political process, leaving a more powerful Zarqawi with weaker competition for ownership of the Sunni rejectionist cause. Those who wanted to carry on the fight, the oligarchs of the fallen regime that acted as the insurgency’s moneymen and even well-established groups like Jaysh Muhammad, were drawn into the Zarqawists’ orbit. These cumulative benefits to the status and wealth of the Zarqawists meant that Sunnis displaced, impoverished, and enraged in Fallujah and elsewhere who wanted to join the insurgency increasingly turned to the IS movement, which dominated the insurgency by the end of 2005. For Al-Qaeda, claiming the Zarqawists as their own put them at centre stage in the contest between jihadism and the West,¹⁵⁷ maintaining their relevance in a period where they had notably failed to repeat the “success” of 9/11.¹⁵⁸ An indicator of the balance in the relationship is that by the summer of 2005, it was AQC asking Zarqawi to send them £100,000.

If there has been any one distortion that has led analysis astray, it is the tendency to view the Zarqawist revolutionary project as an “offshoot” of Al-Qaeda. The factors that had prevented Zarqawi joining Al-Qaeda earlier began to show themselves even before Zarqawi was killed, relations then spent eight years in a state of willed ambiguity under Zarqawi’s successors as each sought deniability to insulate themselves from the implications of the merger, and ended in a catastrophic rupture. This was not a schism in the sense of two entities emerging from common foundations; it was the inevitable unravelling of an attempt, made in contingent circumstances, to merge two distinct and incompatible strategic visions.

Perhaps the central point of contention between the Zarqawists and Al-Qaeda has been what to do with populations that do not agree with them. In theory, both agree with the classical position on non-Muslims under Islamic rule: they can convert; Christians, Jews, and the mysterious “Sabians” may live as subjugated dhimmis; and idolaters or polytheists (mushrikun) who refuse to convert are to be killed (often commuted to enslavement). In practice, however, Al-Qaeda has been very reluctant to engage in inter-confessional warfare, doubtless influenced by the fact its leadership has been in Iran since 2002 and “Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and communication”, as Bin Laden wrote in 2007. The IS movement has no tolerance for such compromises, and the doctrinaire sectarianism of Zarqawi, so alarming to Bin Laden at that first meeting in Kandahar in 1999, was an important part of what frayed relations.

Al-Qaeda’s only real “terms” in the merger with Zarqawi had been that he focus his attacks on the Americans and not ignite his sectarian war until after the Coalition was out; since this was Zarqawi’s plan to defeat the Coalition, he essentially ignored this from the start.¹⁵⁹ As early as July 2005, Al-Zawahiri, as Al-Qaeda’s deputy, sent a famous missive remonstrating with Zarqawi for his indiscriminate attacks on Shi’a civilians, a message subsequently reiterated to Zarqawi in a December 2005 letter from Jamal al-Misrati (Atiya Abd al-Rahman). The Zarqawists’ single deadliest terrorist attack while the Coalition was in Iraq was the August 2007 quadruple suicide bombing west of Mosul that massacred 800 Yazidis, a hideous curtain-raiser for the full-out attempt at genocidal annihilation of the Yazidis in the months after the “caliphate” was announced.

Where the difference in the two jihadist currents is even clearer is how to handle Muslims who, in their perception, do not adhere to “true” Islam. Al-Qaeda always counselled patience, showing Muslims their “errors”. 9/11 was intended as a shortcut: a blow so devastating it caused a U.S. withdrawal from the region, taking its corrupting influence with it, leaving Al-Qaeda to topple the unprotected American client regimes through “elitist” revolutions and “educate” Muslims from the top-down using the state. Shocked by the forceful U.S. response, Bin Laden came to understand Al-Qaeda was too weak to directly confront the U.S.: Al-Qaeda needed greater numbers and the U.S. evicted by attritional warfare, meaning it could not afford to anathematise potential allies and where possible resources should not be wasted on regional governments.¹⁶⁰ Bin Laden reoriented Al-Qaeda in a more “populist”, bottom-up direction, a strategy—expanded upon in Al-Zawahiri’s 2013 “General Guidelines” and crystallised in Syria—that involved getting close to Muslim populations, having them accept a jihadist presence by meeting popular needs and fostering co-dependency, creating spaces of operational freedom for Al-Qaeda. The population would not be antagonised by an all-at-once implementation of the shari’a, only gradually being converted to jihadism. These jihadist-friendly zones would over time become emirates and ultimately link up into a durable caliphate, resting on a broad base of popular consent.¹⁶¹

Al-Qaeda developed this strategy significantly in opposition to Zarqawism, and the IS movement views Al-Qaeda’s approach not only as ineffective, but deviant. For IS, implementing God’s law is not an obligation that depends on opinion polls, and the scale of the problem, with Muslim societies having fallen into jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance), makes Al-Qaeda’s approach of armed missionary activity woefully inadequate. The regimes have to be demolished as swiftly as possible, the “correct” practice of the faith enforced, and Islamdom purged of corrupting elements like Shi’is. The use of takfir (excommunication), declaring a Muslim to be apostate and licensing his killing, has traditionally been hedged about with stringent evidentiary conditions precisely because—without a central Islamic authority—it is so dangerous a concept. Since IS rejects traditional authorities and views most Muslims as having stepped outside the bounds of the faith, the wider-scale use of takfir became one of its defining features. This was a component part of IS’s belief that only a “radical, coercive revolution” could return Muslims to “true” Islam. As one IS operative put it, “If you think people will accept the Islamic project [voluntarily], you’re wrong. They have to be forced at first.”

IS taking this approach after it announced itself in Syria in 2013—declaring its opponents (many of them jihadists) to be apostates it was licit to kill—was the final straw for Al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri’s February 2014 statement disowning IS cited the fitna (strife) it had caused among the “mujahideen” and the oppression of Muslims and non-Muslims in the bill of indictment. Al-Zawahiri was in many ways repeating himself from nine years earlier, and the gulf has only widened since. With both IS and Al-Qaeda convinced their strategies were vindicated by the “caliphate” experience, there will be no attempt to repeat the merger. The competition between the two has shaped the jihadist movement over the last decade and is likely to do so for some time to come.¹⁶²

The interesting issue this raises is why Bin Laden employed the rhetoric he did, approving the mass-use of takfir against (potential) Iraqi voters, in his statement accepting Zarqawi’s bay’a. Bin Laden had to know he was echoing the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), a then-Al-Qaeda affiliate when it informed the Algerian population in 1995, during a (rigged) election by the gruesome Soviet-model dictatorship in that country, that the GIA policy was, “One Vote, One Bullet”, and then made good on it with the wholesale massacre of villages, causing much of the population to look to the state for protection. The IS movement was, even in 2004, clearly following some of the same ideological pathways as the GIA—Zarqawi, indeed, apparently had some contact with the remnants of the GIA networks soon after he arrived in Afghanistan in 1999¹⁶³—and for Al-Qaeda’s leaders and the jihadist strategists around them the GIA was a cautionary tale.¹⁶⁴ The GIA’s behaviour brought such disgrace on the cause that Al-Qaeda severed relations with it in 1997.¹⁶⁵

It is understandable that Bin Laden would not want to have this dispute in public, and perhaps it would be deprioritised even in private under the constraints of time (trying to get the merger with Zarqawi before the second battle of Fallujah), but to give active public encouragement to a program that defines takfir this broadly is strange. It might be said that, as a practical matter, Bin Laden simply was not in a position to control the Zarqawists, so there was no point picking a fight on the subject, but the two obvious responses to this are: (1) choosing not to have a fight over it is very different to an active public endorsement; and (2) Bin Laden did pick a fight on this very subject, seven months later, by which time the IS movement was—partly thanks to the prestige gained from Al-Qaeda’s blessing—more powerful and better positioned to defy instructions from AQC in Pakistan. Al-Zawahiri’s letter made reference to “fears from previous experiences”, specifying Algeria, and Atiya likewise directly mentioned “what happened in Algeria” when telling Zarqawi that the course he was on would bring defeat.

Bin Laden’s motives for the tone and content of the December 2004 statement remain unclear to this day. All that can be said is that it had little effect on the ground—the Zarqawists were unable to significantly hinder Iraq’s first election in January 2005, when 8.4 million people (58% of those eligible) voted in what some call “the Revolution of Purple Ink”—and Bin Laden soon enough realised his error in flirting with takfirism.

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REFERENCES

1. Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan (2016), ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (Updated Edition), pp. 2-3.

2. About ten people knew in advance that Saddam was going to order the annexation of Kuwait; many in the leadership assumed the military build-up was either a bluff, or a preparation for a limited operation along the border and against the islands of Bubiyan and Warba. When Saddam explained his decision to the collective leadership on 7 August 1990, five days after the conquest, he pre-emptively shut down all dissent by informing them: “God … showed us the path. Our brain was worthless in the matter”. It was only after Saddam had explained his decision as God’s will in private that he began explaining it this way in public. See: Amatzia Baram (2014), Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003: Ba’thi Iraq from Secularism to Faith, pp. 212-14.

3. Mrs. Thatcher famously told President George H.W. Bush, as he considered options in response to Saddam’s takeover of Kuwait, that this was “no time to go wobbly”, and she kept up this leading role throughout the crisis. In Mrs. Thatcher’s ideal world, the liberation of Kuwait would have led to the overthrow of Saddam. As Mrs. Thatcher carefully phrased it later, “it would not be a specific objective to bring about [Saddam’s] downfall, though that might be a desirable side-effect of our actions”. See: Margaret Thatcher (1993), The Downing Street Years, p. 827.

4. The Downing Street Years, p. 824.

5. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, p. 8.

6. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, pp. 9-10.

7. Brian Fishman (2016), The Master Plan: ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory, p. 8.

8. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, p. 11.

9. Jean-Charles Brisard and Damien Martinez (2005), Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 65-6.

10. Joby Warrick (2015), Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, chapter four.

11. 9/11 Commission Report (2004), pp. 174-75. Available here.

12. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 71.

13. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, p. 13.

14. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 240. Despite a pseudo-crisis in Iran-Taliban relations after the Taliban massacred Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998, this breach was swiftly repaired and by November 1999 the borders were open again. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 73.

15. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 72.

16. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 75-9.

17. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 111.

18. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 122-23.

19. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 124.

20. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 95.

21. In 2002-03, Iran’s support for Al-Qaeda and other Sunni Islamist terrorists was a highly sensitive U.S. government secret. The attempt to publicise this information in the “Axis of Evil” speech, and over subsequent months, proved controversial. Amazingly—despite the mountains of evidence in the two decades since—the “controversy” about “Shi’a” Iran’s support for Sunni militancy has never abated among analysts.

22. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark (2017), The Exile: The Flight of Osama bin Laden, pp. 201-02.

23. The Exile, p. 146.

24. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 124.

25. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 74, 92-5.

26. The three jihadists were two Jordanians, Firaz Sulaiman Ali Hijir and Ahmed Muhammad Mustafa, and a Palestinian, Ahmet Mahmoud. See: Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 74.

27. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 92-5.

28. Kenneth Katzman (2008, August 15), ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq: Assessment and Outside Links’, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report, p. 6. Available here.

29. For Zarqawi’s presence in Baghdad in May 2002, see: ‘Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare With Prewar Assessments’, 8 September 2006, p. 109. Available here. Also see: George Tenet (2007), At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, p. 350; ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, p. 18; and Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 95. There is no serious dispute about where Zarqawi was at this time; the argument is over what it means.

30. Among the known jihadists to converge on Baghdad with Zarqawi in the spring of 2002 were two veterans of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), Thirwat Shehata and Yusuf al-Dardiri [See: At the Center of the Storm, p. 351], and Zarqawi’s brother-in-law, Iyad al-Tubaysi (Abu Julaybib al-Urduni), who had been with Zarqawi in the Herat camp and followed him through Iran to Iraq. Al-Tubaysi had been a senior official in Jabhat al-Nusra, the IS branch created in Syria in 2011 that defected to Al-Qaeda in 2013, and then joined Tandheem Hurras al-Deen, the ostensible breakaway from Al-Nusra created in early 2018 after Al-Nusra announced a severing of relations with Al-Qaeda in mid-2016. Al-Tubaysi was killed in December 2018. Zarqawi was later joined in Baghdad by Samir Hijazi (Faruq al-Suri or Abu Hammam al-Suri), the current emir of Hurras al-Deen, and Abdul Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir), another EIJ veteran and Zarqawi’s successor as AQM emir (who might have been in Iraq slightly earlier than Zarqawi, travelling in from Yemen via the United Arab Emirates). A murkier case is Khaled al-Aruri (Abu al-Qassam al-Urduni), a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan, one of Zarqawi’s childhood friends: it is simply unclear whether Al-Aruri crossed the Iranian border into Iraqi Kurdistan with Zarqawi in April 2002; it seems Al-Aruri acted as a key liaison with Ansar al-Islam once Zarqawi departed down to Baghdad and then on his Levantine tour, but again whether that was from inside Iraq is opaque. Al-Aruri was clearly close to Iran—he was involved in financing the Casablanca bombings in 2003 that Al-Qaeda’s leadership run out of Iran and coordinated with Zarqawi—and in 2015 Al-Aruri would be “released” by the Iranians to Syria, so it is possible Al-Aruri stayed on the Iranian side of the border in 2002. Al-Aruri was killed in a U.S. drone strike in June 2020.

31. At the Center of the Storm, p. 351.

32. ‘Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq’, 9 July 2004, p. 89. Available here.

33. One of Zarqawi’s lieutenants reported as briefly detained in Saddam’s Iraq is Ali Mustafa Yussef Siam. Arrested probably in January 2003, at Jordan’s request for involvement in the assassination of Ambassador Foley, Siam had also allegedly partaken in Zarqawi-directed plans to assassinate the then-head of Jordan’s GID, Ali Berjak (also transliterated Ali Bourjaq), which was disrupted in February 2002. See: Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 76-7. Siam is presumably the same person as Abu Yasim Sayyem, mentioned in the post-war U.S. Senate investigations, whose release “shocked” the IIS officer who had captured Sayyem or Siam, but there was no choice in the matter: the order to free Siam/Sayyem came directly from Saddam. From about October 2002 until “the beginning of 2003”, Saddam’s regime reportedly arrested “three of Zarqawi’s lieutenants”. See: Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 119. One of these is known to be Samir Hijazi (Abu Hammam al-Shami or Faruq al-Suri). See footnote 150.

34. As the Saddam regime adjusted to a world without the Soviet Union—its patron and model to an extent—the regime explained that it would not go the same way because the Communists were atheists and materialists, but Ba’thists were believers. See: Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, p. 210.

35. ‘Iraq’s Brutal Decrees: Amputation, Branding and the Death Penalty’, Human Rights Watch report, June 1995. Available here.

36. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 314-15.

37. Saddam had played with sectarianism during the long war with the Iranian Revolution. The turning point, though, was March 1991, when, in the wake of Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait, a broad Shi’a rebellion erupted in southern Iraq and was suppressed with utmost savagery. It confirmed all the worst suspicions of both sides: for Saddam, the Shi’is were a fifth column; for the Shi’is, Saddam’s state was hostile beyond redemption. The treatment of the Shi’a south thereafter—as virtually occupied territory, with large numbers of troops and militias to keep it under heavy-handed surveillance; the deliberate underdevelopment to make the zone dependent on the regime; the purges of Shi’is from the Party—and Saddam falling back on trusted (Sunni) clans at the centre widened the state-Shi’i breach further, as did the unequal treatment of Shi’a dissent and intermittent wholesale bans of Shi’a festivals. What little space the Shi’is did have, culturally and religiously, was used to recalibrate their own identity in terms that had a distinct anti-Sunni edge. See: Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 221-49.

38. Samuel Helfont (2018), Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq, p. 191.

39. Part of the reason for the persistence of this myth is that the CIA, which has an aura of authority as a supposedly apolitical intelligence agency that is assumed to have secret sources of quality information, operated on a theory before the invasion that “secular” Ba’thists could not work with religious extremists and—despite the Agency’s own public admissions to the contrary and the blatant falsification of the theory as the regime remnants combined with the jihadists in the insurgency—CIA officials kept disseminating this view through the media after 2003 as part of their bureaucratic warfare to deflect blame for the pre-invasion intelligence failures.

40. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, p. 149.

41. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 190-208.

42. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 261-67, 297-302; and, Compulsion in Religion, pp. 188-99.

43. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 314-18.

44. As it turned out, mixed Sunni-Shi’a marriages in Iraq were never that common. See: Ali Allawi (2007), The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, pp. 127-28.

45. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, p. 315.

46. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, p. 346.

47. The Occupation of Iraq, p. 177.

48. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 314-28.

49. Compulsion in Religion, pp. 195-96.

50. Aaron Faust (2015), The Ba’thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism, p. 31.

51. Joseph Sassoon (2011), Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime, p. 260.

52. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party, pp. 260-64.

53. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 268-69.

54. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 323-24.

55. Compulsion in Religion, p. 182.

56. The term is drawn from Joel Rayburn’s excellent book, Iraq after America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance (2014)

57. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 318-19.

58. Iraq After America, pp. 102-05.

59. Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003, pp. 190-205.

60. Colonel Joel Rayburn and Colonel Frank Sobchak [eds.]  (2019, January 17), The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1: Invasion, Insurgency, Civil War, 2003-2006, p. 14. Available here.

61. Liquor stores were a frequent target of the Iraqi Salafis in the 1990s and early 2000s. For example, one of Zarqawi’s key lieutenants, Umar Hadid, who led the jihadists in his hometown of Fallujah during the battles in 2004, had attacked alcohol vendors—as well as video shops and female hair salons that doubled as brothels—in around 1997, then moved on to attack Saddam’s security forces, killing one and wounding two, before he fled north into the jihadist emirate in Kurdistan that would eventually come under Ansar al-Islam’s rule, with external support from Al-Qaeda, funnelled through Zarqawi.

62. See the independent investigation set up by the British government, chaired by Lord Robin Butler: ‘The Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (“Butler Review”), 14 July 2004, p. 120. Available here.

63. Some accounts put Zarqawi in Syria by July 2002. See: Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 96.

64. Aaron Zelin, ‘Jihadism in Lebanon After the Syrian Uprising’, in: Maximilian Felsch and Martin Wählisch [eds.] (2016), Lebanon and the Arab Uprisings: In the Eye of the Hurricane, p. 51.

65. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 173.

66. Compulsion in Religion, p. 213.

67. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 96.

68. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, p. 102. The man who pulled the trigger in murdering Foley was Salem bin Suweid (Abu Abdullah), a Libyan, and his get-away driver was Yasser Freihat (Abu Firas or Abu Maaz). Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 83-6.

69. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, p. xiii.

70. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 87.

71. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, pp. 78, 108, 119-20.

72. The Exile, pp. 98-104.

73. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 119.

74. Bin Laden speech on 11 February 2003, ‘To the People of Iraq’. See: Bruce Lawrence [ed.] and James Howarth [translator] (2005), Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, p. 184. An alternate translation is: “There will be no harm if the interests of the Muslims converge with the interests of the socialists in the fight against the Crusaders”.

75. The letter from Saddam was read out on state television on 7 December 2002 called for “the mujahideen” in Kuwait to join with him in a common front of “jihad” against America, Britain, and “the Zionist entity” (Israel). The speech was presented as Saddam’s first apology for the hideous occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91, while being quite correctly interpreted by the Kuwaiti authorities as incitement to terrorism, against it and the Coalition forces in the country. (That this was two months after an Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. forces in Kuwait underlined how seriously it had to be taken and Saddam’s recklessness in publicly identifying himself with the jihadists.)

76. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 121.

77. The jihadist groups “took advantage of the increased religiosity of Sunni society … to recruit from a pool of young people who had imbibed the message of Saddam’s Faith Campaign”. See: The Occupation of Iraq, p. 182.

78. The Occupation of Iraq, pp 183-84.

79. Aimen Dean, Paul Cruickshank, and Tim Lister (2018), Nine Lives: My Time As MI6’s Top Spy Inside Al-Qaeda, chapter seven.

80. Compulsion in Religion, pp. 220-21.

81. Iraq After America, pp. 105-06.

82. The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 173-75.

83. The Occupation of Iraq, p. 94.

84. The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 116-17.

85. Naturally, the CIA missed all of this, denigrating intelligence officials like Colonel Derek Harvey who had done close analysis of the insurgency, dismissively referring to the influence of Al-Duri and Yunis as the “Syrian brain theory”, and ignoring the spawn of PROJECT 111 in favour of a belief that the violence was a patriotic “resistance” to the occupation. See: The Endgame, p. 22-23.

86. Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (2012), The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, p. 21.

87. The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 180-81.

88. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 173.

89. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, pp. 173-74.

90. The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 180-81.

91. Iraq After America, pp. 108-09.

92. By late 2005, politically buoyed by the second battle at Fallujah and the bay’a to Al-Qaeda, and practically given more space as insurgent factions left the battlefield to get involved in the political process, the Zarqawists were ascendant within the insurgency; from no later than mid-2006, in the shadow of the Askari Mosque being blown up and serious sectarian strife breaking out, the Zarqawists were decisively dominant in the insurgency.

93. The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 169-170.

94. In the introduction to the official compilation of Zarqawi’s statements and speeches released a few days after he was killed, reference is made to Zarqawi moving “to Iraq, and there he established Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad”. See: “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi” (Al-Arshif Al-Jami’ li Kalimat wa Khitabat Asad al-Islam Al-Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), published on 10 June 2006, p. 2. Available here.

95. Hakim’s brother, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, was at this time the nominal leader of the Badr Corps, a militia entity within the IRGC apparatus. See: The Occupation of Iraq, p. 111. The practical Badr leader was Hadi al-Ameri, an IRGC agent since the 1980s when he crossed the front and joined the Iranian side of the war with Saddam’s Iraq. The Badr Corps was the key seedbed for the IRGC network established in Iraq after 2003 that killed so many Iraqi civilians and Coalition soldiers. Badr’s first leader, Jamal al-Ibrahimi (Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis), Sulaymani’s deputy, and his successor before Al-Ameri took over in the 1990s, Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, both Iraqis by birth who gave themselves over to the Iranian Revolution, were integral to this process, and to the absorption of splinters from the Sadrist Movement. This structure was mobilised in 2011-12 to save the Asad regime in Syria. Badr was a lead participant in the sectarian warfare that broke out later and Al-Ameri personally became notorious for “using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries”.

96. Iraq After America, pp. 105-06.

97. The Occupation of Iraq, p. 181.

98. ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD’, commonly known as “The Duelfer Report”, Volume III, 6 October 2004, p. 94. Available here.

99. Iraq After America, p. 104.

100. The Duelfer Report, Volume III, pp. 93-94.

101. Donald Rumsfeld (2011), Known and Unknown: A Memoir, pp. 459-60.

102. See Nibras Kazimi’s explanation here (19:30-22:00).

103. Symbolic of the fact that while Saddam was alive his deputies remained devoted to him: it was only after Saddam’s execution—within hours, in fact—that Al-Duri felt it appropriate to take a “formal” leadership role in the insurgency, announcing the existence of his Sufi-based network under the name Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshbandi (JRTN) or “Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order”.

104. Speech by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ‘Join the Caravan’, 4 January 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 32-57.

105. Stathis Kalyvas (2000), The Logic of Violence in Civil War, pp. 74-76.

106. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 275.

107. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 268.

108. ‘From Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to My Dear Umma, the Best Umma Brought Forth To Mankind’, 5 April 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 77-91.

109. ‘Blowing up the Intelligence Headquarters: Response to the Lies of the Jordanian Intelligence [Agency]’, 26 April 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 92-5. Zarqawi did use the actual word “Israel”, rather than “Zionist entity” or whatever, at least according to the transcript.

110. Peter Galbraith (2006), The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, chapter two.

111. The rivalry between the Sadr family and the Hakims who controlled SCIRI was long-standing. See: The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 182.

112. Compulsion in Religion, pp. 223-24.

113. The Endgame, pp. 100-01.

114. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 14.

115. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 270-71.

116. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 126.

117. Patrick Cockburn (2008), Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, p. 139.

118. ‘A Short Word on the [Video] Tape of Butchering Nicholas Berg’, 11 May 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 96-9.

119. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 294.

120. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, pp. 74-75, 125-26.

121. Alarmingly, Badr’s entry into the ISF did not even have to be done surreptitiously: it was accepted as part of Bremer’s formal demobilisation of the militias attached to the various political parties in late 2003. Part of the reason was a disastrous misunderstanding of what Badr was, summed up in Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz advocating working with Badr to liquidate Jaysh al-Mahdi, writing in a January 2004 memo that while there was “definitely some conflict” between the U.S.’s goals and those of Badr/SCIRI, it would be “a mistake to think that [the latter] are stalking horses for the Iranians”. See: The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, pp. 217, 270-71.

122. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, pp. 53-55.

123. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, pp. 495-96.

124. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 269.

125. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 272.

126. The Logic of Violence in Civil War, pp. 46, 102-04.

127. The Powell speech is perhaps the most devastating fact to the narrative that “neocons” orchestrated the Iraq war based on “lies” about WMD. This decisive messaging event at the U.N. was created by Powell in collaboration with CIA Director George Tenet, who sat deliberately visible behind Powell throughout. Powell and Tenet hated the “neocons”—the Pentagon civilians and Vice President’s office—and wilfully excluded them from this process. It was Powell who chose to go the United Nations route in the first place—creating the whole issue of Resolution 1441 and the “second resolution”—that reduced almost the entire public messaging campaign to the WMD. It was Powell, too, who chose to focus so much of the U.N. presentation on the WMD issue, and to rely on shaky CIA intelligence. The “neocons”, by contrast, had tried to warn precisely against an overreliance on such information, and against narrowing the entire matter to the WMDs, when Congress had passed an AUMF listing twenty reasons to remove Saddam that contained unarguable facts about Saddam’s attacks on (and continuing threat to) neighbouring states, the assistance to a wide range of terrorist groups, the atrocious internal human rights situation, and even “smaller” issues like the missing Kuwaiti prisoners (whose return was a condition of the ceasefire in 1991). See: War and Decision, pp. 351-56.

128. $25 million was also the amount that had been offered for Saddam before he was captured.

129. ‘A Lament: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Mourns Abu al-Bara al-Kuwaiti, Faysal al-Mutayri’, 17 June 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 104-06. The full name of “Abu al-Bara” was Faysal bin Zayd al-Mutayri: a Kuwaiti jihadist, he apparently arrived in Iraq via Syria in October or November 2003, and blew himself up in a suicide attack four or five days before this speech by Zarqawi in June 2004.

130. ‘When Men Cry’, 19 June 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 107-13. Darwish took over as Zarqawi’s deputy in September 2004 when the prior occupant of the post, Umar Yusef al-Juma (Abu Anas al-Shami), was killed. The date of Darwish’s death remains distinctly murky, though it was probably in January or February 2005.

131. ‘Important Commandments to the Mujahideen and a Reply to the Defeatists’, 5 July 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 114-40.

132. Compulsion in Religion, pp. 226-27.

133. ‘Our Shar’i Position on Iraq’s Karzai’, 23 July 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 141-48.

134. ‘A Short Word From Shaykh Abu Musab Via the [Video] Tape “Winds of Victory”,’ 8 August 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 149-52.

135. The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 322-33.

136. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, pp. 391-92.

137. Carter Malkasian (2018), Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State, p. 40.

138. ‘Where Are the People of Courage?’, 11 September 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 153-65.

139. ‘A Short Word on the Slaughter of Alan [sic] Armstrong’, 10 October 2004 [sic], “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 169-73.

140. ‘A Lament: Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Mourns Shaykh Abu Anas al-Shami, God Have Mercy on Him’, 26 September 2004, “The Complete Archive of the Words and Speeches of the Lion of Islam, the Shaykh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, pp. 166-68. Abu Anas’ real name can also be transliterated as Omar Yusef Juma’a.

141. The word translated as “mordacious” is “عاضّاً”, which could also be rendered as “bitter” or “severe”, and more loosely as “tyrannical” or “repressive”.

142. The word translated as “main” is “أصليين”, which could also be rendered “premier” or “original”.

143. The phrase translated as “urbanite and nomad” is “madar wa-wabar”, which literally means “[those who dwell in homes of] clay and camel hair”: the intent is to convey, with the traditional Arab preference for a rhyming couplet, the ancient duality in human populations between “the settled agriculturalist and the mobile pastoralist”. See: Tim Mackintosh-Smith (2019), Arabs: A 3,000-Year History, p. 25.

144. The Master Plan, pp. 33-37.

145. The Master Plan, pp. 37-38.

146. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 355.

147. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 351.

148. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, p. 299.

149. One of the few to notice before 2011 that the Zarqawists had detected an opportunity in Syria was Nibras Kazimi. See: Syria through Jihadist Eyes: A Perfect Enemy (2010).

150. The one case where the Saddam regime is known to have taken some more serious action against a Zarqawi associate is Samir Hijazi, but that case comes with an important asterisk. After four months in Baghdad, Hijazi was arrested and, as a Syrian national, deported to Syria—where Zarqawi had already ordered him to go to manage the “ratlines” feeding foreign fighters into Iraq with the complicity of the Asad regime. Asad promptly released Hijazi, who got to work on the task Zarqawi had set him. Perhaps it was a fortunate coincidence.

151. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 128.

152. The summary of this evidence can be found in the last finished CIA product on the Saddam-Qaeda relationship before the invasion, Iraqi Support for Terrorism, initially published on 19 September 2002 and updated in January 2003. Iraqi Support for Terrorism was produced after the CIA’s lack of rigour in analysing Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda—the Agency’s tendency to examine the issue through the prism of an a priori theory that “secular” Ba’thists and Islamists could not cooperate—had been criticised by the Pentagon, a process the post-war investigation found improved the CIA’s work.

153. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 134.

154. For more detail on Pakistan’s creation and control of the jihadist network, including the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, which ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s and now does again, see: Oved Lobel (2021, August 4), ‘The Graveyard of Empires: The Causes and Consequences of American Withdrawal from Afghanistan’, European Eye on Radicalization Report. Available here.

155. From a U.S. Federal Court case, James Owens vs. Sudan (2011), p. 12. Available here.

156. United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Report, 13 February 2023, p. 3. Available here.

157. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, pp. 393-95.

158. Kyle Orton, (2023, February 23), ‘Is Al-Qaeda Capable of Global Terrorism Any More?’, European Eye on Radicalization Report, pp. 6-8. Available here.

159. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1, pp. 394.

160. These points—avoiding open combat with more powerful opponents, sensitivity to Muslim public opinion, integrating with local communities, with an emphasis on winning “hearts and minds” to cultivate jihadism, avoiding needless accusations of unbelief due and getting preoccupied with disagreements over ideological arcana, and “deconflicting” with regional states to keep the focus on the main adversary—track very closely with the strategic vision of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (Abu Musab al-Suri). On the last point, Setmariam gives the example of his own willingness, during the Syrian Islamist revolt in the 1970s-80s, to work with Saddam’s government. See: Jim Lacey [ed.] (2008), A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto, pp. 111, 195-96.

161. ‘Is Al-Qaeda Capable of Global Terrorism Any More?’, pp. 14-20.

162. ‘Is Al-Qaeda Capable of Global Terrorism Any More?’, pp. 18-20.

163. Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, p. 70.

164. A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad, pp. 136-45

165. Bin Laden never publicly repudiated the GIA, but it is known that in late 1997 the Qaeda leader withdrew his support for the GIA. The most public manifestation of this decision was when the London-based jihadi cleric Mustafa Kamel Mustafa (Abu Hamza al-Masri) turned on the GIA in September 1997. Abu Hamza had lost both hands, which he replaced with hooks, and an eye when he mishandled explosives during the anti-Soviet jihad. This distinctive appearance, and Abu Hamza’s infamous sermons at the Finsbury Park mosque, made him a fixture of the British tabloid press, which callously referred to him as “Captain Hook”. See: Gilles Kepel (2006), Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, pp. 270-73.