Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi -the new Bin Laden

Mangaloretoday.com/India Today

Iraq, June 30: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi leads ISIS and Levant on a rampage in Iraq. Several years ago I had lunch in a downtown Tehran restaurant with a young engineering student who had agreed to help me with my faltering study of Persian grammar. With an uncle in Iran’s "elite" Revolutionary Guard, he was, I’d been told, connected- well worth the price of a meal at the very least.


Lunch was interesting. After much ta’arof, the Iranian way of managing social relations based on ornate-some might say disingenuous-courtesy ("Your Persian is excellent!", "You’re so knowledgeable about Iran."), the talk turned to politics. Iran’s nuclear programme was inevitably discussed before my new friend broached the subject of the worsening situation in Iraq.

Did I detect a note of Schadenfreude as he regretfully detailed the coalition’s failings ("such a terrible mess-so sad") in the country, over kebab and rice? The conversation shifted once more, this time to the hunt for then al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "Your MI6 and CIA cannot find one man," he sighed demurely.

"Give our Quds force two weeks and they would finish the job." He paused to drink some sweet tea. "And of course they know Iraq so well, too." If the Iranians never got the chance to hunt down bin Laden, they may soon bring their expert knowledge of Iraq to taking down the man who has replaced him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who leads the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIS), the Sunni Jihadist group busily murdering its way across Iraq.

ISIS’s dash across Iraq has alarmed governments across the world-not least India’s, which is trying to secure the release of all 30 or so Indian hostages being held by unknown (most likely ISIS) militants in Mosul. Delhi is also aware of the wider problem. ISIS has rebooted the jihadi franchise; Sunni insurgents around the world are watching and hoping to emulate its striking success. Both al Qaeda and the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba are capable of launching terror strikes in India, while a possible spurt in violence in Jammu & Kashmir, taking the Government’s focus away from growth and much-needed economic recovery, also remains a danger. Prolonged instability in Iraq could also hike India’s oil prices (Iraq is the country’s second largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia) futher damaging the economy. The threat is significant and proximate-not bad for a man who is only 42.

 

Until earlier this month al-Baghdadi was largely an international unknown, which is unsurprising if regrettable. He is a mysterious figure (even his name is a nom de guerre). Details of his life are sketchy, and it is difficult to separate fact from the (cultivated) myth that surrounds him, but it is known that he was born in the Iraqi town of Samarra in 1971. Jihadist websites claim he is a scholarly imam with an impeccable family pedigree and a PhD in Islamic Studies from Baghdad’s Islamic University.

What is clear is that he joined the insurgency following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, commanding militant groups that fought US troops before joining Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq. His actions eventually led him to a four-year stay in Camp Bucca, a US prison in southern Iraq, from 2005-09. The guards remember him only as a quiet if calculating prisoner, definitely not one of the worst, who were generally held in Compound 14 within the camp, the section reserved for the most extremist Sunni inmates.

On his release, he returned to terrorist life, eventually becoming al Qaeda in Iraq’s leader in 2010. From the beginning, al-Baghdadi has been a reticent jihadist boss, preferring to limit his grandiose statements and avoiding the dramatic videos favoured by many of his peers. Only two known photos of him exist; one released by the Iraqi interior ministry and one by the American Rewards for Justice Program, on whose website his image sits alongside a $10 million offer for information leading to his capture. It’s the face of mediocrity: Rounded, almost spherical and pudgy. Weak-chinned. Nondescript, until, it barely troubles the imagination to envisage, those two black dots are switched on by the twin lights of obsession and fanaticism.

It is these qualities that make al-Baghdadi such a hero to his followers. To them he is a leader who has proved himself in combat (certainly no dry Islamic theologian as al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri). He controls day-today operations, which-together with his secrecy-only increases his prestige.

What he lacks in talk, he makes up for with ambition. Frustrated with limiting his sadism to Iraq, he formally decided to expand into Syria on April 8, 2013 and in so doing, morphed ISIS into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). One of the first things he did in Syria was to seize the oilfields in its east. ISIS had already stolen and extorted its way to millions of dollars in Iraq but the ability to sell oil-as well as looted antiques (one haul of 8000-year-old relics reportedly fetched $36 million)-in the black market has given it the financial power usually reserved for states, giving its name a new resonance.

ISIS’s surge has surprised everyone but it shouldn’t have done so. In March 2013, the group conquered the provincial capital of Raqqa in central Syria; almost a year later it took the majority Sunni city of Fallujah in Iraq’s western province of Anbar, and then seized parts of another provincial capital, Ramadi, just 100 km from Baghdad. It took the group’s June takeover of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the largest ever to fall to jihadis, to awaken the world. ISIS is now richer than ever before, after stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Mosul branch of Iraq’s central bank and taking control of more oilfields, this time in northern Iraq. The group now reportedly has around $2 billion in total assets. Over the last few days, it has captured more towns along the Euphrates and Anbar; it now sits just over 40 miles from Baghdad.

Al-Baghdadi has proved to be the complete 21st century jihadi: Not only financially astute but internet-savvy. The camera phone and broadband internet have propelled ISIS into the international imagination. Recently, the group abducted and beheaded an Iraqi police officer and then tweeted a picture of the severed head with the caption: "This is our ball. It is made of skin #WorldCup". The other recent photographs of rows of Iraqi soldiers lying face down on the ground before being machine-gunned to death took minutes to go global after being posted online.

Beyond the display of extreme barbarism, these photographs serve a dual purpose: To terrorise and to recruit. ISIS’s unprecedented success has made it the group of choice for the aspiring jihadi. It makes al Qaeda look positively analogue. But while al-Baghdadi may have one foot in the 21st century, the other is rooted in antiquity. At the heart of his ideology is the atavistic, Islamist desire to restore a caliphate (an Islamic state headed by a Caliph, a supreme religious and political leader) stretching from Syria to Iraq. This desire is not as absurd as it may sound. A Sunni entity now exists in all but name across parts of the two countries, stretching from Aleppo in Syria all the way to Mosul in northern Iraq and across to the Anbar province west of Baghdad.

On June 10, ISIS fighters posted a photograph of them destroying the barriers between Syria and Iraq with the tagline "smashing the Sykes-Picot border". It was a clear reference to the 1916 agreement between Francois Georges-Picot and Sir Mark Sykes that divided the (non-Arabian) Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into areas of future British and French control. With a succession of hubristic pen strokes, the two diplomats created Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, with an almost willful ignorance (or worse, disregard) of tribal culture and ethnic and religious identity.

Nowhere was this more egregious than in the case of Iraq: Slapped together from the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, it ’united’ Kurd, Sunni and Shia under what would prove to be the most artificial and problematic of neologisms: Iraqi. It is these divisions, exacerbated, first by the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and then disastrous leadership of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, that ISIS has so adroitly exploited. Saddam Hussein’s removal freed Iraq’s Shia majority from the decades of oppression they had suffered at his hands. The subsequent failure of coalition forces to create a stable state in the war’s aftermath allowed them a longed-for opportunity to vent their grievances on their Sunni neighbours and turn Iraq into an abattoir of sectarian bloodshed.

In their desperation to find a ’strongman’ who was capable of restoring order to the country, the US and UK then compounded their initial mistake by settling on Maliki as their preferred candidate, and helping to secure his election as Iraqi prime minister in April 2006. Maliki was ’strong’, but he was also a bigot. Capable Sunni ministers were booted out of office on spurious grounds and the offices of state and the civil service filled with Shias determined to strengthen their grip on Iraq at the expense of the Sunnis.

ISIS’s stampede through the predominantly Sunni northern Iraq has largely been achieved through support from elements of the local population and the feebleness of an Iraqi army filled with Sunnis who have no intention of laying down their life to protect Maliki’s government. The Shias, meanwhile, are mobilising en masse against the ISIS ’Takfiris’. Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued a fatwa urging the country’s Shias to take up arms against ISIS to protect their shrines.

Armed Shia militias now march through Iraqi towns to the consternation of watching Sunnis. Maliki’s actions have cost Iraq dearly and in the political stupidity of his rule, the words of Napoleon’s foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, are discernible: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake." The Kurds, meanwhile, have their own concerns. As the Iraqi army deserted the oil-rich city of Kirkuk (Jerusalem for Kurds), Kurdish forces moved in. They have little inclination to leave.

"Kirkuk is ours," said my Kurdish friend Mustafa to me over the phone. "And our state is coming, just watch." Statehood is a centuries-old Kurdish dream and Mustafa was merely echoing a belief now percolating through Iraqi Kurdistan. Even Iraq’s Kurdish President Massoud Barzani was clear on this point: "After the recent events in Iraq, it has been proved that the Kurdish people should seize the opportunity now (to) determine their future," he told CNN recently.

Iraq is unravelling. And Iran (which already holds considerable influence in the country) has stepped gratefully into the mess. The Revolutionary Guard has two battalions on the ground while the Quds force chief Major General Qassem Suleimani is reportedly in Baghdad overseeing the fightback. Tehran considers the fall of Iraq to ISIS an existential threat. It possesses the resources to ensure this doesn’t happen. Suleimani is already organising Iraqi military reforms and taking control of its security services. My former lunch companion’s words were indeed prescient: The Quds force knows Iraq so well.

And they won’t be working alone. The US is equally determined to defeat ISIS, and while official cooperation between Tehran and Washington remains distasteful to both sides (both the US State Department and Hassan Firoozabadi, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, have dismissed the idea), its eventuality cannot be discounted. Iraq is likely to need some form of US air or drone strikes. If this happens, Washington will be providing de facto air cover to Iranian soldiers on the ground, no matter how unpalatable either side finds that prospect.

Iraq will cost Iran money and lives, but I suspect Suleimani believes it is worth the cost. The Iraqi government is now almost as dependent on Iran as the militia group Hezbollah is in Lebanon and Bashar al-Assad is in Syria. Shia communities across West Asia, terrified by ISIS, including, critically, those communities in Sunni-majority countries, have witnessed the inability of the Iraqi and Syrian governments to defeat their respective jihadis and now view Iran as the only bulwark against growing Sunni fanaticism.

All this has terrified Saudi Arabia, the region’s "Sunni lion". The emergence of an increasingly powerful and anti-Sunni Shia Crescent (the notionally crescent-shaped region of West Asia with a high Shia population, stretching from Lebanon right around to Qatar) has, in Riyadh’s eyes, materialised. Saudi spy chief Youssef bin Ali al-Idrisi is fighting a proxy sectarian war with Suleimani in Syria as Iranians battle to keep the Alawite Assad in power and Saudis fund Sunni rebels groups trying to overthrow him. Like pretty much all of the Saudi leadership, al-Idrisi is known to be horrified by what he perceives as Washington’s abdication of responsibility in the region: "First Obama refused to launch airstrikes against Assad, now he’s handing over Iraq to the Iranians," goes the Saudi thinking.

Just over a decade ago, the West decided to reorder Iraq’s internal politics and in so doing, set in motion events that have reordered West Asia’s geopolitical landscape-to Iran’s benefit. As ISIS continues to advance across Iraq, it is clear that the only immutable law in West Asia is the one of unintended consequences.

David Patrikarakos is a journalist and author of Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State