Read Online ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan
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another. It made no difference that Ayad Allawi, a onetime Baathist turned enemy of the party and a secular shia well-respected by Sunnis, was now the interim prime minister of Iraq. Gordon and Trainor recount how on one inoperable US Bradley fighting vehicle that sat along the street in September 2004 “insurgents had hung a black Tawhid wal-Jihad flag on its 25mm gun, and the battalion tasked with controlling the place, from the 1st Cavalry Division, began calling Haifa ‘Little Fallujah’ and ‘Purple Heart Boulevard,’ after the medal that would be awarded to 160 of the unit’s 800 soldiers by the time they went home in early 2005. In Dora [yet another district of Baghdad infiltrated by insurgents], another 1st Cavalry battalion began to see new graffiti as Second Fallujah inflamed the Sunni population and the January election loomed: ‘No, No, Allawi, Yes, Yes, Zarqawi.’ ”
THE FALL(S) OF MOSUL
Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, had seemed relatively stable during the early days of the occupation, when it was first secured by Petraeus’s 101st Airborne. But the calm was illusory. Al-Zarqawi had made the city his fallback base, and just days into major combat operations for the Second Battle of Fallujah, Mosul fell to the insurgency.
Ninewah’s provincial capital had always been susceptible to Sunni rejectionism, given its cocktail composition of Saddamists and Salafists. Unemployment in Mosul hovered at around 75 percent, according to Sadi Ahmed Pire, the Patriotic Union ofKurdistan’s security chief in the city, and thus locals could be hired to carry out terrorist operations for as little as fifty dollars. As in prior battles, the local Iraqi police and army disappeared, their stations either stormed by insurgents facing little resistance or set ablaze. The ease with which Mosul collapsed also seemingly vindicated Derek Harvey’s prior assessment to the US military: namely that the city’s US-appointed police chief, Muhammed Khairi al-Barhawi, had been quietly playing for both teams.
Though al-Barhawi may have been an Iraqi intelligence asset all along, the Zarqawists certainly didn’t make it easy for other Mosulawis to sincerely partner with the Americans. They were especially brutal to any Iraqi soldier or policeman who didn’t abandon his post; in one notorious episode, they even tracked a wounded major to the hospital where he was being treated and beheaded him there. In the end, as with Fallujah, it took another overwhelming commitment of US firepower and manpower—joined by an unusually competent contingent of the Iraqi Special Police Commandos—to regain control of Mosul in the face of a combined Baathist–al-Qaeda onslaught of machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
A decade later, history repeated itself, as Mosul once again fell to a hybridized insurgency made up of al-Zarqawi’s disciples and the Baathists of al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army. Only this time, there was no US military presence to retake the city. ISIS sacked Mosul in less than a week. The jihadists rule it to this day.
3
THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY
BIRTH OF THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ
Al-Zarqawi’s sinister strategy hewed closely to a text titled Idarat al-Tawahhush ,or The Management of Savagery , published online in 2004 as a combined field manual and manifesto for the establishment of the caliphate. Its author, Abu Bakr Naji, conceived of a battle plan for weakening enemy states through what he called “power of vexation and exhaustion.” Drawing the United States into open as opposed to “proxy” warfare in the Middle East was the whole point, because Naji believed that once American soldiers were killed by mujahidin on the battlefield, the “media halo” surrounding their presumed invincibility would vanish. Muslims would then be “dazzled” at the harm they could inflict on a weak and morally corrupted superpower as well as incensed at the occupation of their holy lands, driving them to jihad. He
THE FALL(S) OF MOSUL
Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, had seemed relatively stable during the early days of the occupation, when it was first secured by Petraeus’s 101st Airborne. But the calm was illusory. Al-Zarqawi had made the city his fallback base, and just days into major combat operations for the Second Battle of Fallujah, Mosul fell to the insurgency.
Ninewah’s provincial capital had always been susceptible to Sunni rejectionism, given its cocktail composition of Saddamists and Salafists. Unemployment in Mosul hovered at around 75 percent, according to Sadi Ahmed Pire, the Patriotic Union ofKurdistan’s security chief in the city, and thus locals could be hired to carry out terrorist operations for as little as fifty dollars. As in prior battles, the local Iraqi police and army disappeared, their stations either stormed by insurgents facing little resistance or set ablaze. The ease with which Mosul collapsed also seemingly vindicated Derek Harvey’s prior assessment to the US military: namely that the city’s US-appointed police chief, Muhammed Khairi al-Barhawi, had been quietly playing for both teams.
Though al-Barhawi may have been an Iraqi intelligence asset all along, the Zarqawists certainly didn’t make it easy for other Mosulawis to sincerely partner with the Americans. They were especially brutal to any Iraqi soldier or policeman who didn’t abandon his post; in one notorious episode, they even tracked a wounded major to the hospital where he was being treated and beheaded him there. In the end, as with Fallujah, it took another overwhelming commitment of US firepower and manpower—joined by an unusually competent contingent of the Iraqi Special Police Commandos—to regain control of Mosul in the face of a combined Baathist–al-Qaeda onslaught of machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
A decade later, history repeated itself, as Mosul once again fell to a hybridized insurgency made up of al-Zarqawi’s disciples and the Baathists of al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army. Only this time, there was no US military presence to retake the city. ISIS sacked Mosul in less than a week. The jihadists rule it to this day.
3
THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY
BIRTH OF THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ
Al-Zarqawi’s sinister strategy hewed closely to a text titled Idarat al-Tawahhush ,or The Management of Savagery , published online in 2004 as a combined field manual and manifesto for the establishment of the caliphate. Its author, Abu Bakr Naji, conceived of a battle plan for weakening enemy states through what he called “power of vexation and exhaustion.” Drawing the United States into open as opposed to “proxy” warfare in the Middle East was the whole point, because Naji believed that once American soldiers were killed by mujahidin on the battlefield, the “media halo” surrounding their presumed invincibility would vanish. Muslims would then be “dazzled” at the harm they could inflict on a weak and morally corrupted superpower as well as incensed at the occupation of their holy lands, driving them to jihad. He
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