Recently, the New York Times, working with Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Rukmini Callimachi, spent fifteen months unpacking a trove of over fifteen thousand internal documents of the so-called “Islamic State“, painstakingly assembled over the course of a five trips to Iraq over the span of a year.
The documents are fascinating, intriguing…and alarming…as they expose, in excruciating detail, the internal operations of a group of modern barbarians, along with the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ by which they were able sustain a functioning state, under continuous attack, largely cut off from external aid.
Despite its barbaric nihilism – including public mass beheadings and a return to open-air (and openly televised) slave markets – the terrorist state at one point controlled a swath of territory the size of Great Britain, as well as a population estimated at nearly 12 million people, not to mention parts of Libya, Nigeria and the Philippines coming under their nominal control, via various local groups swearing allegiance to the group. As fascinating as the article – as well as its attendant photo archive and supplementary articles – may be, it is even more fascinating for what it does not say, namely:
How did this happen?
One of the curious blind spots of the Times’ reporting, is that they already had the answer to this question. As early as August of 2014, the Times quite accurately reported that ISIL relied heavily on former officers – and civil officials – of deposed and executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces and the Iraqi Ba’ath Party structure.
Many of these men – most of them dedicated career officers and officials – were summarily ejected from the Iraqi governmental and military structure through the staggering incompetence of the Coalition Provisioning Authority in the aftermath of the Coalition invasion of Iraq, which toppled the dictator from power. The Coalition’s ill-conceived Order Number 2 effectively destroyed the internal structure of Iraq at a stroke, leading to chaos within the country, and directly to the uprising of the Sunni demographic minority, who had formed the majority of the Iraqi state’s bureaucracy for its entire existence. Democratic structures are always messy to implement, and in a culture with little to no concept of the principles involved, the chances of abuse is heightened, especially when the demographic majority has been systematically abused by a controlling minority.
Iraq was no different, and once George W. Bush, left office in early 2009, to be replaced by the ineffectual and diffident Barack Obama, who was eager to fulfill his campaign promise to get the United States out of Iraq, no matter what, as soon as possible, old hatreds that had been suppressed by the heavy presence of Coalition forces immediately began to regain ground.
ISIL forces were not terribly energetic in their capture of Mosul – Iraq’s “second city” – in 2014, and by all rights, outnumbered by as much as 15-to-1, should have been speedily annihilated by the Iraqi 2nd and 3rd Infantry divisions…which didn’t happen, due to the systematic reprisals by the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki against the mostly-Sunni officer and NCO corps’ that had been carefully built by US and Coalition military advisor teams for almost ten years, all of which went largely unaddressed by President Obama until it was nearly too late. That Iraq remained intact at all, and that ISIL’s offensive first stalled, then fizzled, was due to the restraint showed by – of all entities – Iran.
Iran – ancient Persia – has been in the “war business” for a very long time, and saw the trap they were being enticed into from a mile away…and declined to bite. The Iranian mullahs (who learned their lesson after nearly being toppled during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988) asked their professional soldiers – the Artesh – what to do. The Artesh, knowing their job very well, told the mullahs to avoid sending in the Artesh at all costs, and to send – at most – the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ “Quds Force” (their version of “special forces“). Their reasoning was as simple as it was true: Sending in the Artesh to try and copy the American- and British-led invasion of the country a decade before would be seen by the Sunni Muslim world as an invasion by infidels, and that is was better to let ISIL strangle itself. (The Freedomist has covered some of this elsewhere.)
However – a lack of Western grand strategies aside – with the conquest of Mosul, it suddenly became apparent that ISIL was not the typical terror group. While the vast bulk of their non-Iraqi or -Syrian recruits were in their mid-20’s and well-educated, but mostly work-inexperienced and largely ignorant of the Quran or the intricacies of Sharia law, and most of their in-country recruits tended to be indifferently educated and had little experience of the wider world, the group seemed able to “magically” set up and run a functioning state almost literally overnight.
How was such a thing possible? What happened, to cause this?
In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, and the disenfranchisement of the bulk of the Iraqi government bureaucrats and military officers by Order Number 2, it is clear that a number of mid-level (captains and majors, primarily) military officers – and possibly some civil servants – fled into Syria. While Syria was not an active member of the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” then entrenched in neighboring Iraq, they largely kept their Ba’athist cousins in check. In such an environment, with nothing else to do, and with undoubted access to some of the many secret bank accounts squirreled away by Saddam and his henchmen, such men would have done what all of their professional training told them to do: assess what had happened to get them to that place, and plan for what to do to regain some semblance of their former power and self-respect.
Freed from the constraints of the ruthless, sadistic, paranoid and militarily-incompetent Saddam and his henchmen, these professionally trained officers would have conducted a multi-leveled interdisciplinary review, that examined and assessed Iraq’s defeats of the preceding twenty-odd years, the reasons for the United States’ and its allies repeated victories over them, the state of their finances, what immediately-available technology and supplies those funds could purchase, and how to more effectively employ those assets…there were just two problems these men could not overcome, given the regime philosophy they had served: a lack of privates, and the lack of a figurehead.
As mid-level officers, these men were largely faceless and unknown – the stereotypical “gray man“. But, they could not implement their plans without an army of “spear-carriers” and a leader…which is the point where fate, in the form of the “Arab Spring“, intervened.
As the region’s more restrictive states began to explode with internal protests in December of 2010, it quickly became apparent that the United States was involved, at least at some level. As protests began to intensify in Syria in early 2011, the former Iraqi officers in Syria undoubtedly began to wonder if this was their moment. While certainly grateful for the sanctuary provided by Bashar al-Assad, they would also have chafed at the restrictions he kept them under.
As early as August, 2011 what would become ISIL – after relentless pounding by US and Coalition forces, that also saw the death of its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the rise of his successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – began withdrawing into western Iraq…and began filtering cadre into Syria to help form what would become the al-Nusra Front. This is likely the point, in 2013, where the two groups first mingled, given the al-Nusra/ISIL group’s rapid growth in effectiveness, its apparent professionalism and its reputed large numbers of “foreign” fighters.
By January of 2014, it was too late: a well-motivated and suddenly professional ISIL, reinforced by dissident al-Nusra troops and the bulk of the Russian-speaking Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (JMA) group, roared out of Aleppo and Raqqa, and into history…
…But in their wake, came the “little grey men“: military bureaucrats and administrators – professional, worldly and well-educated – appeared hot on the heels of the assault units, rounding up the local populace, for either recruitment, co-opting or “ethnic cleansing“. They swiftly established licensing and tax collection regimens, “bootstrapped” an economy from scratch, and started to put services back into operation, i.e., literally “turning the lights back on” and repairing water supply and treatment systems…all while creating a receiving/inventory/reissue system for loot taken from the homes and businesses of non-Sunni’s (or those Sunni’s who opposed them) who had been massacred or driven out of their homes, to be reissued on a “ration book“-style system to fighters arriving in the new state, along with a property redistribution system for housing their new troops.
As Ms. Callimachi points out in her Times article, the administrative and logistical professionalism of these men was breathtaking in its effects: ISIL operations within its territory were almost entirely financed by its internal taxation policies. While there was clear assistance from outside, the lesson Ms. Callimachi presents is stark: a non-state group can, given enough forethought by its leadership – or its middle managers – as well as a lack of interference in day-to-day operations by inexperienced leaders, and effective military training at even a low level, can self-sustain itself in ways we have rarely seen, previously.
While none of this was ever exactly “secret” information, a mythology has grown up, which states that “military and governmental professionalism” implied the requirement for a vast, complex and expensive infrastructure to function. In fact, it is the systems and processes that make a professional infrastructure, long before money changes hands, “brick-and-mortar” facilities are built, and equipment is purchased. None of this is surprising, as most of the systems and processes are little different from Western Cold War-era nuclear attack recovery plans…The Islamic State simply started at that point, using frameworks of established systems and processes gleaned from publicly-available government websites on the internet, rather than developing a wholly-new process from scratch.
And if ISIL can do it, any group that operates to at least their level can do it, as well.
Someone has opened Pandora’s box, again…and the future bodes ill for it.
