ISIS

The History of the Islamic State

Composed by Walead Farwana

Twitter: @Walled_Farana

On August 7th, President Obama authorized airstrikes on Iraq in nominal support of a besieged population of about 10,000 Yezidis, a Kurdish ethnic minority, who were placed under siege by the Sunni Jihadist Islamic State, henceforth to be referred to as (ISIS). In mainstream media, the intervention has been criticized as backtracking on what is already a quagmire created by the 2003 American invasion under Bush II, and an occupation supervised by Obama from 2008-11. Another argument is that Obama is showing his support for the autonomous region of Kurdistan, whose leaders aided the United States extensively in the 2003-2011 occupation.

I will make a case that the Iraqi conflict is attributable to the United States ruinous war policy, including the rise of ISIS, and I will give the brief history of ISIS and how US policies, particularly Obama’s, facilitated the growth of ISIS and opened a void for its revolutionary agenda.

ISIS has gone through several transformations, and I will detail each stage, as well as the US's role within each of them. They are as follows:

1) Jama'at al Tawhid w'al Jihad (JTJ)

2) Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)

3) The Islamic State in Iraq (ISI)

4) The Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS)

5) The Islamic State (IS)

Note: I am referring to the current incarnation of the Islamic State as ISIS because it is the abbreviation most familiar to the Western audience and because it is extremely annoying to use the IS abbreviation, particularly when typing the phrase "IS is..."

JTJ

The original incarnation of ISIS was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the "boogeyman"of the American occupation of Iraq between the years of 2003-6. The information I obtained on JTJ and Zarqawi is derived from Loretta Napoleoni’s 2005 book, Insurgent Iraq, which is the best English-language resource on his life.This organization was, at first, distinct from al-Qaeda in operations but identical in ideology. It was one of the myriad Jihadist groups which incubated in Afghanistan during the 90s up until the US began dropping bombs there in 2001. Zarqawi and his militia left Afghanistan to take refuge with (ironically) the Kurdish branch of al-Qaeda who were based in the mountain ranges of the northern part of Iraq. It is worth mentioning that this migration by Zarqawi from Afghanistan to Iraq was one of the key pretexts that the White House under Bush II gave for invading Iraq in the first place. Saddam had nothing to do with it, however, as he was enemies with the Kurds.

I will spend what may seem like an inordinate amount of time talking about Zarqawi, but it is necessary because he is the progenitor of ISIS. If we follow the “great man” theory of history, I would say that there would be no ISIS today without Zarqawi and his “vision,” as he essentially tore through the fabric of the existing state paradigms of the region with the immense and horrific violence he inflicted. The vacuum he left would be filled, successfully it would seem, by his successors.

Zarqawi and his JTJ did not participate in battles against US forces until August of 2003. By that time, they had had the opportunity allow the occupying forces to settle in and were able to scout their positions and tactics. JTJ selected terrorism as its strategy, and its inaugural bombing campaign was directed at both US forces as well as Shiite civilians. It was the attacks on the Shiites which immediately perturbed the Jihadist leadership in Afghanistan, including bin Laden who, at first, demanded he stop. While the Jihadists were all for attacking US forces, attacking Shiites was viewed as too extreme and counterproductive. In the eyes of the al Qaeda bosses of the time, Shiites were still Muslims, even if they were not Sunnis, and the goal of bin Laden in particular was to unite all of the Muslims against the United States in order to expel them from Iraq.

Bin Laden, however, was not on the ground to understand the situation from the lens of Zarqawi. Through Zarqawi’s looking glass, as tainted as it may have been with bloodlust, the Shiites were collaborators with the US occupation and thus enemies of the Sunnis. The key thing to focus on here is that the US deliberately adopted a sectarian-based strategy to divide and conquer Iraq from the outset of the invasion. They intentionally took sides on a sectarian basis, exploiting a key division in society which ended up backfiring in their face as I will expound upon later.

Pre-invasion, the US had negotiated with a number of Iraqi dissidents, and the majority of the Iraqis who helped the United States plan the invasion were Shiites and Kurds. Thus, these became the favored groups and, notably, the US did not station its forces in the Shiite south of Iraq, instead leaving the responsibility up to the British whose mission was more symbolic than operations-oriented.

Meanwhile, Zarqawi migrated from Kurdistan and found refuge amongst the Iraqi Sunni tribes in West and Central Iraq.

Iraqi Tribal System

It is necessary to talk about this system because it is a key part of the conflict and often overlooked. Norman Cigar, a researcher and professor at the Marine Corps University, released an extensive book on the tribal dynamics between Salafist organizations and the Iraqi tribes which is where most of this information comes from, The tribal system is exactly as it sounds. It is an ancient institution which grants power and control on a hereditary basis. Within each tribe, there are a subset of clans, then individual families, and so on. The largest tribal confederations in Iraq number in the hundreds of thousands and the largest tribe, the Dulaim, is three million strong. These people essentially enforce their own laws and the failure to end or marginalize the tribal system is a large reason why the Middle East remains so backward and violent as they essentially act as a state-within-a-state.

Cigar notes that the Sunni tribes also came into prominence in Iraq after the Iran-Iraq war and First Gulf War in 1991 as Saddam was badly weakened internally by these conflicts and thus fell back on the tribes to bail him out. Tribal leaders assumed high ranks in the Iraqi Army, thus entrenching their power. Thus the Iraqi Sunni tribes became powerbrokers in the country and saw the US invasion and Saddam’s demise as a direct threat to their capacities, especially as the Iraqi Army as they had known it was decimated and effectively scrapped.

However the tribal system has its weaknesses. Because tribes are so enormous, and because power is concentrated at the very top, there are large swathes of disaffected men in the system. Essentially it is a pyramid structure where the lower-status men lose out on privileges, i.e. jobs, monetary handouts, and wives. Because Islam permits polygamy with up to four wives, the men at the bottom often also miss out on mating opportunities. Tribes tend to be highly fundamentalist in their interpretation of Islam largely because fundamentalist Islam is a system which offers considerable advantages to tribal alpha males, such as polygamy. The creator of Islam, Muhammad, was a tribal warlord himself.

Sectarian violence in Iraq during the US occupation

Zarqawi's stated aim was to precipitate a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. His goal was to undermine Iraqi nationalism for reasons I will explain later. Most Sunnis were not on board with this plan, particularly the Jihadist leadership in Afghanistan and the majority of Sunnis in Iraq. The tribal warlords who held sway in the Sunni regions of Iraq (located in the central, west, and northern parts of the country) had everything to lose from a protracted war against the Shiites, who were ~66% of the population. Their plan was instead to establish a confederacy within the borders of Iraq so that they could practice a degree of autonomy. The warlords viewed Zarqawi as a foreign troublemaker and harped on the fact that he had come from Afghanistan to wage war against a "foreign power" when he himself was a foreigner to Iraq meddling in Iraqi affairs.

According to Napoleoni, this irony was something Zarqawi was well aware of, but a fact that he did not accept. He did not accept the traditional political borders of the Middle East created by the British and French at the beginning of the 20th century and sought to redraw them on sectarian lines instead. In his view, he was not an outsider. He was a Muslim in the lands of Islam. Zarqawi opposed Iraqi nationalism because Iraqi nationalism was a dire threat to his life, his mission, and his organization. If the Sunnis rallied around a nationalistic banner, his pan-Islamic organization’s ideology would become viewed as a threat to be excised by not just Shiites, but also his Sunni brethren. Through his bombings, he attempted to poison the well of Sunni-Shiite relations so extensively that a unified state would become impossible. With the void in military force left by Saddam’s fall, it appeared he had plenty of space to create such a venomous milieu.

Ironically, Iraqi nationalism was also a strong danger to the United States. Chapter 10 in Insurgent Iraq describes a botched campaign of pre-war bribery, one where the US had managed to stoke resentment within Shiites as well. The funds it distributed to the Shiite political warlords who helped pave the way for its invasion were predictably corrupt and hoarding money intended for the Iraqi public, instead handing it out to their underlings in the Iraqi upper class. Furthermore, Washington’s Shiites agents were mostly composed of individuals who had been expelled from Iraq by Saddam during the 80s and 90s. Many of them had not set foot in Iraq for years. These new US-sponsored political leaders were alien to the local Shiites, notably the powerful clerics of the Sadr family. Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric himself with his Mahdi Army militia, claimed to represent the interests of the Shiite poor in Iraq. The Mahdi Army fought against US forces throughout Baghdad in response to the occupation and openly shunned the upper class Shiites collaborating with US military forces. Sadr also provided a political entry point for Iran into the Iraq War, as they funded and trained his militia.

The nightmare scenario was that this Mahdi Army would sign an agreement with the Sunni insurgent groups in West Iraq, thereby forming a unified national front against the US occupation and critically endangering any claim they might have made on forming a government in the name of national unity. The US thus had to work to prevent Iraqi nationalism from coming into being under the premise of armed opposition to the US occupation. They instead instead sought to funnel nationalism via a system of bribery into a US-dominated order held aloft by a facade of democratic elections.

Of course, this bribery was not effective in actually building a nation. Factions would participate in elections only to keep the American money flowing and, as we will see, when the US left, Iraq broke down along militant sectarian lines again. The farce of Iraqi “democracy” was a PR stunt to convince Americans that Bush and the Neocons had not swindled America out of billions for a bunk war.

According to Norman Cigar, the US believed it would be able to ignore the Sunnis at the outset of the Iraqi rebuilding effort, and thus focused its bribery efforts on the Shiites and Kurds using money and political power within a US-designed state as carrots. The Sunnis responded with a sustained revolt against the US occupation between 2003-8, coming to a head in the battles for Fallujah in 2004. Chapter 11 of Insurgent Iraq describes how it was during the second battle of Fallujah that JTJ made a name for itself as one of the vanguard groups of the Iraqi resistance to US occupation. The US stated their goal in Fallujah was the dismantlement the “Zarqawi network” based there. Despite massive destruction and devastation inflicted on Fallujah, they failed to do so, probably because Zarqawi wasn’t even in Fallujah during the siege. Following America’s failure to dismantle JTJ in its siege, Zarqawi became a superstar among Jihadists worldwide.

Islam and tribalism

Political Islam has always sought to undermine the power of the tribes. Muhammad himself was a low-ranking member of the Quraysh tribe so his story is essentially about how he created a divine pretext to overthrow the tribal leaders of his own family and assume a dominant position. This story resonates with a large part of Middle Eastern society, especially those in the tribal system at the lower tier of the hierarchy.

The ideology of ISIS and al-Qaeda is referred to as "Salafism" and it is a movement stressing a return to the foundations of Islam. This essentially means mimicking the lifestyle of Muhammad in 7th century Arabia. This is considered insane to many Muslims, but it nonetheless does find a very large following in tribal regions across the Muslim world. The reason for this is that many of the lower caste tribal youth resonate very strongly with the story of Muhammad and seek to recreate his story. This is why the tribal system is essentially a breeding ground for this type of religious conflict. The irrational authority of the tribal warlord is replaced by the irrational authority of religious scholars and Mujahidin.

JTJ metamorphoses into Al Qaeda in Iraq

After the second battle of Fallujah, Zarqawi's propaganda apparatus helped bolster him as one of the heroes of the fight against the Americans. He was one of the few who had stood his ground against suicidal odds and emerged to tell the story. Zarqawi still had problems with legitimacy in Iraq, and also with his funding. One from the persistent nationalist angle, and the other from his lack of religious authority. According to Cigar, to cope with the first problem, he had to start recruiting Sunnis from within Iraq in order to give the organization a more "national" flavor and to take away at least one of the pretexts of his critics. He got these recruits from the lower strata of the Iraqi tribal system. Essentially, he offered these individuals, who had no hope of social mobility in their own system due to birth order, an opportunity to have a stake in a new, Islamic "tribe."

Loretta Napoleoni described Zarqawi as functionally illiterate, and militant Islamists derive much of their social support from the fact that their leaders are titular experts in Islamic doctrine in a region where theology is considered the supreme form of thought. Zarqawi’s Sunni rivals were able to encourage Islamic scholars in Iraq to label his mission of establishing a caliphate and an Islamic State theologically impure, and so he was losing the ability to recruit Mujahidin and his Sunni enemies were gradually building a case to expel or kill him. He had to find religious authorities to sanction his mission, and he found a lifeline with a couple old associates: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, the heads of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, religious scholars and commanders of vast sums of money for the Jihadist mission.

The alliance between Zarqawi and bin Laden was mutually beneficial. Osama bin Laden also found himself wanting a stake in the Iraqi violence as the war in Afghanistan was going poorly for him. He offered to make Zarqawi an "emir" of al Qaeda, essentially making him a sponsored warlord of Iraq and giving him access to all of Qaeda's money and political connections across the region. Bin Laden also issued religious edicts sanctifying Zarqawi’s mission thus giving him legitimacy against rival clerics in Iraq.

Ironically, the US harping on Zarqawi as a boogeyman made him more popular. It was free advertisement for Zarqawi. One of the reasons why Bin Laden selected Zarqawi as his emir because he was the most well-known of the Jihadists and would bring the most prestige to al Qaeda. However, this also implicitly meant that bin Laden signed onto Zarqawi’s sectarian war. Any would-be Jihadist migrating to take a crack at the US occupation also sought to join Zarqawi's ranks, as he was considered to be the most famous and powerful Jihadist. This is ironic given that JTJ was only one of many Jihadist factions, however the US in its desperation to fabricate a strawman it could point to as “proof” that American forces had a coherent enemy in Iraq, ended up animating a monster. It is a rather sad fact that much of the current Iraqi tragedy came about because of Bush’s cynicism and narcissism in trying to sell across propaganda points to the American public.

In 2005, JTJ changed its name to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and continued its bombing attacks reenergied with a new, steady flow of money. By 2006, Zarqawi got what he finally looking for: a civil war in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites. This came about after his operatives blew up the Askari shrine, which was one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam. The commencement of sectarian hostilities basically marked the end of Iraq as a state.

However, during the same time, Zarqawi had also managed to precipitate a war against the Sunni tribal warlords in Iraq who began to see him as a serious threat to their rule now that he was recruiting the low castes of their system for his Jihad. This AQI-Tribal war came to a head in 2005 when Zarqawi bombed hotels in Jordan and Egypt, which were housing Iraqi tribal leaders who found sanctuary there away from the Iraqi violence. This move was his undoing, as he'd then created enough enemies that he no longer had a safe haven in Iraq.

AQI had certainly bitten off more than it could chew, now fighting a war against the superpower, Sunni tribal warlords, and the Shiite majority of Iraq.

Zarqawi was killed in a US airstrike in July 2006. He was replaced by another operative named Abu Ayyub al Masri who steered AQI in much the same way that Zarqawi had, focusing on "high-profile" bombings of Shiite targets, usually civilians and the holy shrines and mosques sacred to them.

Sahwa Militias and the disintegration of the Iraqi state

In 2005, general elections were held in Iraq, which the Sunnis boycotted. I know I am jumping around here in the timeline, but I promise you this section will end being temporally coherent. All of the information I use on Sahwa militias and this section can be found in Norman Cigar’s book.

The United States again had a problem with its PR in that one of the three major sects refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Iraqi state, thus detonating the premise of Iraqi nationalism. Sunnis had no interest in joining an order dominated by Shiites and Kurds. By law, the president of Iraq must be a Kurd, and the prime minister will inevitably be Shiite since they are >60% of the population of Iraq. Sunnis thus had very little interest in democracy. They were the kingmakers under Saddam and were not willing to join the government established by the Americans.

US command viewed JTJ/AQI as an obstacle in getting Sunni popular opinion on their side. In 2005, the civil war had not yet started in earnest and so there were hopes that Iraq was still salvageable under the banner of US-sponsored Iraqi nationalism. At this point, the United States made the fateful decision to begin arming Sunni tribes in order to fight AQI. This was a critical juncture because in arming these tribes who had already existed as a “state” of their own for centuries, they further eroded any chance that the Iraqi central government would have a monopoly on force inside Iraq’s Sykes-Picot geography. This move greatly angered the Shiites and Kurds.

When the sectarian civil war began in 2006, the US also began to design its "surge" strategy where it would increase the number of US troops by 20,000 in the Sunni regions of Iraq and started an aggressive campaign to arm the Sunni tribal militias who called themselves the "Sahwa" (translation: Awakening) in Iraq.

Like the Shiites the US funded, these Sahwa leaders were also corrupt and hoarded their cash stockpiles. The US was spending millions of dollars a day on these Sahwa militias. The incompetence was so rife that it was estimated that a large percentage of the rosters submitted to the US command for salary payments were padded with up to 60% fake names. These militia leaders spent taxpayer money on frivolities like mansions painted pink, stables of race horses, and sports cars.

However, the US kept paying because the strategy was working, and the Sahwa were successful in curbing the activities of AQI. They probably ratted out Zarqawi to the US, who killed him in the aforementioned 2006 air strike, and they also helped locate and kill Zarqawi's successors. At their height, the Sahwa fielded an estimated 80,000 men in Iraq. For comparisons sake, AQI probably had only 1,000 operatives, many of whom were probably foreign fighters alien to the country.

I will now skip an expanse of time, essentially from 2007 to 2011 because these four years basically see the marginalization of AQI and its fight for survival thanks to the Sahwa militias. During these years, AQI also changes its name to the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and takes a more Iraq-centric focus rather than an international one. However, key factors occurred in 2011 which would breathe life back into the organization and shift its orientation back to the international stage.

Describing Jihadi Organizations

I'm including this section in order to better explain how these Jihadist organizations derive their power. The Jihadist mission is easily compared to European colonial-settler movements that were popular in the 19th century, only Jihad is an export from the Gulf Arab states. Because these Gulf states derive their vast wealth from pumping black stuff out of the ground rather than contributing actual intellectual and scientific value to civilization, they can afford to indulge in self-serving religious backwardness. This fosters societies obsessed with Islam and groups of men willing to go abroad to conquer other nations using it as a pretext.

The Middle East is, as you may have long-realized, a medieval place. The tribal regions are essentially stuck in the 10th or 11th century in terms of their thinking as evidenced by their hereditary balance of power, religiosity, and lack of industry. The most dangerous tribes are those like the Saudis, who have vast wealth and thus access to all of the First World’s weapons. The Saudi tribe, for example, derives its rule from internal religious authorities. People like Zarqawi and bin Laden were essentially looking to replicate the example of the Saudi tribe elsewhere in the world. In Zarqawi’s case, it was Iraq; in bin Laden’s, Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda’s leadership are religious scholars. Bin Laden himself was probably an adept of Islamic theology, although it is equally likely that he purchased his Islamic "degree" and flaunted it as proof of his authority. I also like to think of Al Qaeda and organizations like it as being the Muslim analogs of the Catholic Church in the medieval era when they sent mercenaries on "Crusades" to conquer foreign territory. Al Qaeda has sent their agents across the world in the hopes that they can destabilize and overthrow the local tribal rulers by delegitimizing them with religious pretext. This plan worked brilliantly with ISIS in the areas it now controls.

It is my opinion that the reason why there are sects in the first place is due to the fact that one warlord using religious "authority" runs up against another person using the same religious authority and they essentially split off into different religio-tribal organizations. In the Arab world, the people who obsessively accuse others of apostasy as a pretext for violence are called Takfiris. This term is used in a pejorative manner, as the strategy of declaring enemies to be apostate is well known throughout the Middle East and has been performed throughout history to instigate violence. ISIS is the best example of a Takfiri organization. Takfirism is basically the equivalent of people in the West conflating anything or anybody they don’t like with Hitler and Nazis or as an “enemy of democracy.”

2011

The two critical events that occurred in 2011 were the civil wars in Libya and Syria, as well as the US withdrawal from Iraq.

The fall of Gaddafi produced a strategic situation which saw Jihadists, with the help of US air support, overrun Libya. What resulted was that these Jihadists opened up Gaddafi's weapons stores to every other Jihadi group in the Middle East, and the war in Syria was the primary destination for these "liberated" arms caches. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar were making several airlifts and cargo shipments from Libya to Turkey and back in order to facilitate the dispensation of weapons to an assortment of rebels, including ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the "official" al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. These arms ended up reenergizing the Jihadist movement in Syria.

So, ironically, the United States in destabilizing Libya helped to pave the way for the rise of ISIS when the flood of Libyan weapons came into their hands, most notably anti-tank and even anti-air weapons. The Libyan intervention is likely to go down as one of the greatest blunders of American foreign policy, as it has created yet another Jihadist outpost on African soil.

The war in Syria, unlike the one in Libya, took on highly sectarian tones, similar to the Iraqi experience. The "president" of Syria (really just the leader of the largest fighting force) is Bashar al-Assad who comes from a minority sect called the Alawites. To Sunni Jihadists, this is seen as unacceptable, given that Syria is 80% Sunni, and thus it was perceived by them as another example of Sunni oppression. Not to say Assad is a good guy, but his wife is a Sunni, and much of his army and its command are Sunnis. In other words, the idea that Assad is necessarily sectarian is false and mostly a pretext used by Takfiris to delegitimize him.

As the Libyan and Syrian wars went on, the US began its preparations to leave Iraq in 2011. Part of this meant that they would cease their payments to the Sahwa militias, suddenly leaving vast swathes of Sunni street thugs unemployed and politically marginalized. In arming these militias, the Americans had created a state-within-a-state situation. According to Cigar, The central government had no authority to reign these militias in, and integrating the militias into the armed forces had failed.

What ensued after the US withdrawal was the fracturing of the "central" (really Shiite, Baghdad-based) government along sectarian lines. The Shiite Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, effectively sent Shiite forces to occupy the Sunni towns and massacred Sunni civilians, chasing out Sunni politicians, and even sentencing a former Sunni vice president who served up until 2009 to death in absentia.

Simultaneously, because of the sectarian overtones of the Syrian war, Sunni donors from the Gulf states began to contribute vast amounts of money to al Qaeda central leadership in the Af-Pak tribal belt in to fund the Jihad against Assad and what had emerged as a "Shiite axis" between Iran and Hezbollah in Assad’s corner. Al Qaeda began to increase the funding of its Iraqi cells to join the fight in Syria, as they were essentially next door neighbors. ISI operatives were to infiltrate Syria under the organizational title "Jabhat al-Nusra" (JN), which translates to "The Front of Helpers."

Due to the fact that many former Sahwa militiamen were now broke with the departure of the United States, and the tribal leaders who were formerly under pay from the Americans could no longer pay lower caste members of the tribes, JN found a stable base within Iraq from which they could launch strikes into Syria. This Qaeda-Tribal realignment represents another pivotal point in the history of ISIS.

US destabilization of Syria

In its support for toppling Assad by aiding the Syrian rebels, many of whose allegiances exist in a state of flux and who have defected to ISIS, the US essentially made it possible for ISIS to rise and take command of eastern Syria. While you can argue that Washington probably didn’t directly arm and train ISIS, it nonetheless facilitated and supported a chaos scenario where ISIS could rise to the top of the Jihadist hierarchy.

Ironically, in 2010, Assad offered to assist the US in a war against Takfiri rebels operating on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Assad’s government has fought Jihadists for decades and considered themselves “experts” on the affair. The US refused and, in 2011, they armed Jihadists instead to depose Assad.

Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS

JN quickly gained a reputation as being the most extreme (and most effective) rebel fighting group in Syria. They were better funded, better trained, and many had had years of experience fighting US occupation forces in Iraq. One of the byproducts of wars is the creation of a class of experienced fighters. While many militants die, the ones who survive tend to be resilient given that they are often the most skilled combatants in the field. JN had a great number of these.

Furthermore, the extreme factions will often find the best recruits and people most willing to join up with their cause. If you’re a prospective Jihadist, you will probably pick the most aggressive faction to join since it maximizes your chance of survival if you are with the strongest contingent. If you look at the history of statehood in general, it is usually the most murderous and extreme of the militias who rise to power. This was true of the Leninists in Russia, the Zionists in Palestine, and it appears ISIS in Iraq/Syria.

JN eventually fractured, however, forming a splinter group called the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (Sham = Levant in Arabic). Effectively, the ISI contingent of JN had gotten "too extreme” for al Qaeda's tastes. Too much of Zarqawi's ghost had lived on in the organization so this splintering led to bloodshed between JN members and the newly formed ISIS, which was led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. JN was getting a lot of negative press in the West and the greater Middle East because of its penchant for using massacres as a tool for scaring populations into submission, as well as other heinous crimes such as mass rapes and looting. Ironically, ISIS practiced Takfirism against JN in order to encourage more bloodshed.

Al Qaeda central command ordered ISIS to rejoin with JN under a single banner. ISIS refused and this led to Al Qaeda essentially banning ISIS from the organization. This did not really matter, however, as ISIS were now the main players on the Iraqi-Syrian border. They did not need AQ central leadership because they had enough support from the Iraqi tribal system to survive and thrive.

ISIS

What distinguished ISIS from the rest of the militias is that it had a stated aim of establishing a state. This meant a focus on attacking their enemies, but also a heavy focus on subduing the civilian population through propaganda and terror. The group was experienced, having had years of practice in Iraq and in other conflicts around the globe.

ISIS has an international angle, unlike the Syrian and Iraqi nationalist militias. This international focus essentially gives them access to a far larger pool of recruits and has enabled them to link up with several other Jihadist factions across the world, most notably the Chechen Jihadists and other fighters across Europe and the Caucuses. The Chechens are also highly experienced fighters, having fought the Russians for years in recent times, and so they constitute one of the most deadly fighting forces in Iraq and Syria. The field commander of ISIS operates under the field name Abu Omar al-Shishani (literally Abu Omar The Chechen).

The goal of Jihadist groups like ISIS has always had a state-building component to it. Even Zarqawi had aims at establishing a state and there was a definite method to his abject madness in slaughtering civilians. ISIS also has aggressively pursued the recruitment and indoctrination of children in the towns under its control. Several videos are available online of ISIS rallying children at public executions and sponsored events.

ISIS's breakout moment was their June 2014 invasion of northern Iraq which began with a jailbreak of thousands of Sunni prisoners from Iraqi military jails. In the eyes of ISIS, the Iraqi military are essentially just a Shiite militia, and they refer to them as the "Army of the Safavids," with Safavid being a reference to medieval Persian, Shiite rulers of Mesopotamia.

Following this jailbreak, ISIS launched a blitz on northern Iraq, seizing Mosul, Iraq's oil-rich, and second largest city, as well as taking control of towns all over western and central Iraq. The US-trained Iraqi army, which took billions of dollars to create, effectively collapsed in 24 hours. 30,000 Iraqi troops shrank back in the face of about 3,000 ISIS militiamen, resulting in one of the greatest military routs in the region's history.

If you remember how I mentioned previously that a great deal of this Jihadist doctrine is tied into the militias viewing themselves as walking the path of the ancient, “untainted” Muslims around the time of Muhammad, then this episode of the ISIS blitzkrieg into Iraq was a fulfillment of prophecy in the minds of Sunnis and ISIS. The original Muslim conquests of Mesopotamia and the Levant proceeded in the same blitz fashion, where a small army of Muslims conquered Byzantine and Persian armies which often outnumbered them by 4 or 5 times. The conquest by ISIS affirmed in the minds of Sunnis that history was repeating itself as the "true Muslims" routed the infidels thanks to the grace of god and the holiness of their mission.

However, the real story is a lot less fantastical. ISIS had simply took over the Sunni areas of Iraq which were under effective occupation by Shiite forces. Shiite troops and the Sunnis serving alongside them in the Iraqi army had no interest in losing their lives for the sake of a corrupt authority in Baghdad bent on policing a Sunni population. They dropped their guns and ran and were summarily routed by ISIS. Shiites were executed, Sunnis were spared as a part of an amnesty program. The sparing of the lives of Sunnis is actually a development in the tactics of ISIS, as they were against such amnesty measures in their past iterations, notably under Zarqawi.

ISIS publicized images and video of the rout and ensuing capture of hundreds of Shiite troops, executing them on camera in systematic fashion. This represented Iraq officially splitting on its sectarian lines. Because the Iraqi Army left their equipment largely intact, ISIS got access to tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters (which they don’t know how to use yet), and a large amount of ammunition, uniforms, and other types of hardware to help them consolidate rule over Iraq. In addition, they robbed the central bank of Mosul and other banks across Iraq which led to them claiming up to 400 million dollars in cash.

In addition to the arms and cash, ISIS also took hold of the oil fields across northern Iraq and makes perhaps 3 million a day in black market oil sales according to “experts.” This has made ISIS self-sufficient and this operational strategy is a large reason why they abandoned al Qaeda central leadership to begin with. They no longer had to take marching orders from an isolated leadership between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The success of ISIS has led hundreds of people from Europe and other parts of the world streaming into the area under ISIS control to pledge allegiance to Caliph Ibrahim, with some estimated 6,300 aspiring Jihadists migrating to Syria and Mesopotamia in the month of July 2014 alone.

Upon conquering northern and central Iraq, ISIS changed its name to the Islamic State (IS), and declared Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph Ibrahim. As the Caliphate was declared, the Kurds also formally announced their break from the Iraqi central government, harkening the rise of Iraqi Kurdistan as a fully independent region.

In response to ISIS takeover, Obama sent about 300 advisors to Iraq. Ironically, the Iranian revolutionary guards are also in Iraq at the time of this writing to help bolster the defenses of Baghdad in expectation of an ISIS push to take control of Baghdad. At the end of August, Obama announced yet another 300 troops were to be sent back to Mesopotamia following the execution of American cameraman James Foley and threats to murder another, Steven Sotloff.

The Islamic State and Kurdistan

The Kurds are dispersed throughout the Middle East, although they have a large territory in the Northeast of Iraq in the mountain ranges between Iraq and Iran. Ironically, this is where Zarqawi initially found refuge when he fled Afghanistan.

ISIS began operations on Kurdistan in late July of this year, but prior to the commencement of those hostilities, they had been rooting out religious minorities under their dominion. The message to the non-Sunnis was to convert to Islam or pay a "Jizya," which is essentially a tax for not being a Sunni Muslim. After a period of a few weeks , ISIS arbitrarily changed the message to "leave or die," thus triggering an exodus of Christians from northern Iraq.

After the Christians, the Jihadists turned their sights on the Kurds, and this is where the line in the sand was drawn by the United States. In the geopolitical theater, Obama had no intentions on allowing ISIS to usurp Kurdistan, as this posed a grave threat to the geopolitical balance in the region.

Iraqi Kurdistan is a socially divided entity. There are Salafi Jihadist Kurds who generally are young people or lower caste people disaffected by the ruling tribal structure of Kurdistan. Kurds also tend to be Sunni Muslim, which would have meant that the transnational ISIS would likely be able to incorporate Kurdistan as one of its "emirates."

The Kurdish leadership have a good relationship with Washington, as they were the chief collaborators with the US occupation. They are also considered a vital part of the intelligence apparatus in the greater Middle East area, as they work with Mossad and the CIA to spy on neighboring Iran and the surrounding states.

International outcry came about once ISIS added the Yezidi religious group to its genocidal hit list, leading to a subsequent set of massacres and the hot pursuit of a civilian population up Shingal Mountain. The Yezidis began dying of thirst in the caves of their makeshift stronghold in the ensuing ISIS siege and it was at this time that the Americans made a humanitarian air drop to them while the world looked. This was basically the political cover story for launching airstrikes on ISIS. Washington’s message to ISIS is “don’t fuck with the Kurds, you can have everything else.”

While Obama was probably willing to tolerate the Sunni parts of Iraq falling to ISIS, the Kurdish regions were a red line. This is evidenced by the fact that there was no vitriolic reaction to the fall of Mosul and the drive of ISIS toward Baghdad. In fact, the central government of Iraq essentially had to turn to the Russians, who are allied with Assad and Iran, in order to assist them with the vital problems facing their rule in Iraq.

The relatively muted US response, which includes only limited airstrikes, and only airstrikes in ISIS’s Iraqi half, could be because it wants to keep ISIS intact enough that it continues to constitute a thorn in the side of Iran on its eastern border and Assad in the West. Perhaps Washington has learned its lesson about the inevitable results of deposing warlords without viable alternatives. The best case scenario for Washington may be a prolonged war between the Sunnis of Iraq and the Levant and the Shiite countries bordering them.

Notes on the Kurds

The information I’m including below is not to vilify Kurds, but rather to provide some clarity about the people who Washington is supporting.

Kurdish rule in Iraq is essentially a dictatorship led by the Barzani clan. It is a tribal area, like the culture of their Sunni Arab adversaries. In 2011, they violently suppressed protests by their fellow Kurds protesting the Barzani dictatorship. It is also an area where female genital mutilation is considered normal and, despite a nominal “ban” in response to Western pressure, the practice continues unabated. Note, male genital mutilation is also endemic across the Middle East, although it is FGM which generally gets Westerners up in arms, so I highlight this because it flies in the face of the narrative purported by the US government that it is helping out some free, democratic bastion against a murderous Jihadist organization. Truth is, it is one medieval set of people clashing with another medieval set of people.

Notes on US involvement

I think it is necessary to recap how the US helped precipitate this crisis:

1) They invaded Iraq, thus upsetting the balance of power there and leaving a vacuum to be filled by Zarqawi and JTJ

2) They pursued a policy of sectarian divide-and-conquer, thus effectively setting up sectarian military boundaries in Iraq when they simultaneously armed Sunni tribes alongside the Shiite-dominated central government

3) The attack on Libya that toppled Gaddafi created the rise of Jihadists there and a subsequent flood of weapons into Syria that bolstered ISIS

4) US support for rebel groups in Syria undermined Assad who was a bulwark against Jihadism in the region, again bolstering ISIS

SOURCES

The History of ISIS and Zarqawi

1. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria by Charles River Editors

http://www.amazon.com/The-Islamic-State-Iraq-Syria-ebook/dp/B00LLXY5VK

2. Insurgent Iraq by Loretta Napoleoni

http://www.amazon.com/Insurgent-Iraq-Zarqawi-New-Generation-ebook/dp/B000RRD9B8/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1407548771&sr=1-1&keywords=insurgent+iraq

3. Al Qaida, the tribes, and the government by Norman Cigar

http://www.amazon.com/Al-Qaida-Tribes-Government-Prospects-Unstable/dp/1475058705

Tribal System

1. The Iraqi Tribal Structure by Jesmeen Khan