Seven years after US forces under Gen. David Petraeus drove them out of Iraq’s Anbar province, a coalition of desperados led by Sunni Muslim jihadists have scored their biggest victory by seizing Mosul, Iraq’s third most populous city.
On Wednesday, they underlined their appetite for conquest by making a dash for another big city, oil-rich Kirkuk.
Who are these people and what do they want? More important: Could they win?
The coalition got its start in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, in 2004, as a band of cut-throats from Saddam Hussein’s disbanded Presidential Guard. By 2006, they’d been joined by hundreds of al Qaeda jihadists from the Arabian Peninsula and were able to mount raids into several Sunni-majority towns in Anbar.
Their success persuaded fence-sitters among Sunni Arab tribes to join in a bid to carve out a fiefdom in the twin cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
The US surge upset those plans as Petraeus persuaded the tribes to switch sides. Over 2,000 jihadists were captured and transferred to Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. After the US withdrawal in 2011, the group revived, resuming operations under the label Al Qaeda in Iraq — but with little success.
But then Syria’s civil war provided new opportunities. The group relabeled itself “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” a k a ISIS — or Da’esh in Arabic.
Da’esh received a boost when over 1,500 of its fighters managed to break out of Abu Ghraib and join the jihad in Syria. Former Syrian Vice President Abdul-Halim Khaddam claims the outbreak had tacit approval from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as part of a plan to split the anti-Assad opposition in Syria.
The claim sounds credible, if only because Da’esh, rather than fighting Assad, spent its energy against rival jihadists.
Yet nothing is ever simple in the Middle East: Da’esh has also received financial and propaganda support from the Salafi movement, a rival of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Salafis are backed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s new, anti-Brotherhood president, Abdul-Fattah al-Sissi.
In more than a year of fighting, Da’esh succeeded in driving rival groups, including those of al Qaeda, out of several areas in Al-Haska, Al-Raqqah and Deir al-Zour. It then turned its attention to Iraq, regaining its lost foothold in Fallujah and then capturing several villages.
The present situation recalls many episodes in Islamic history in which everybody fought everybody else, all in the name of Islam.
Da’esh now consists of three layers.
The first, and oldest, represents remnants of Saddam’s regime. Initially powerful, especially from looting the central bank before the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the Saddamites are no longer in the driving seat.
In fact, they should be glad they haven’t had their throats cut by their brothers.
The second layer consists of tribesmen from both Syria and Iraq who resent the Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad and the Nusairi (“Alawite”) regime in Damascus. They believe that they have a chance to carve out a purely Arab Sunni state encompassing three Iraqi and two Syrian provinces.
The third layer is represented by jihadists from 40-plus countries, including the European Union nations. Paris authorities put the number of French citizens fighting in Syria and Iraq at over 400.
Last year, Da’esh issued its “program” for the creation of a state in Syria and Iraq as the first step toward the revival of the caliphate and the resumption of Islam’s project for “global conquest.” Its shadowy leader, Abu-Bakar al-Baghdadi, was named interim caliph.
Da’esh is believed to have five fighting groups with a total of 7,000 men. However, yesterday it released some 3,000 prisoners in Mosul and Badash, inviting them to join the jihad.
The state that Da’esh hopes to set up would cover an area of around 15,000 square miles astraddle the Iraq-Syria border, with a population around 3.3 million. This would kill Iran’s dream of a Shi’ite Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and could damage Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Yet the prospects of Da’esh realizing its dream don’t seem bright.
Iraqi units in Mosul chose to run away, largely because some officers are unhappy about what they see as Maliki’s growing authoritarianism.
But that pattern need not be repeated. In fact, Iraqi units on Wednesday fought to protect Kirkuk and managed to expel Da’esh from several nearby villages. That a quarter of Mosul’s population chose to flee shows that not all Iraqi Sunnis want to live under an Islamic caliphate.
Da’esh should and could be defeated. That, however, requires the creation of a government reflecting the wishes of the Iraqi people as expressed in their recent general election.