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Authors: Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan
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urged that they should then focus on attacking the economic and cultural institutions (such as the hydrocarbon industries) of the “apostate” regimes aligned withthe United States. “The public will see how the troops flee,” Naji wrote, “heeding nothing. At this point, savagery and chaos begin and these regions will start to suffer from the absence of security. This is in addition to the exhaustion and draining (that results from) attacking the remaining targets and opposing the authorities.”
Naji was using the time-honored jihadist example of Egypt, but he was also implicitly referring to Iraq, where he urged the fast consolidation of jihadist victory in order to “take over the surrounding countries.” One ISIS-affiliated cleric told us that Naji’s book is widely circulated among provincial ISIS commanders and some rank-and-file fighters as a way to justify beheadings as not only religiously permissible but recommended by God and his prophet. For ISIS, The Management of Savagery ’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious matters. Naji at one point lectures the reader, arguing that the way jihad is taught “on paper” makes it harder for young mujahidin to understand the true meaning of the concept. “One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening (others), and massacring. I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them. . . .[H]e cannot continue to fight and move from one stage to another unless the beginning stage contains a stage of massacring the enemy and making him homeless. . . .”
THE SUNNI BOYCOTT
To succeed in Iraq, al-Zarqawi needed to both massacre and dispossess the enemy (the Shia and Americans) and keep Sunnis divested of any stake in what he saw as their conspiratorial project: the creation of a democratic Iraqi government. Both the Baathists and the Zarqawists undertook a campaign to enforce a Sunni boycott of the forthcoming January 2005 Iraqi election. It worked.Less than 1 percent of Sunnis cast ballots in a key province in central Iraq—Anbar. The result conformed exactly to the dire scenario outlined by al-Zarqawi in his letter a year earlier: the Shia parties won the election by an overwhelming percentage, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Dawa Party candidate who had received millions in campaign funding from Iran, became prime minister in a government that would draft Iraq’s new constitution and thus determine the country’s postwar fate. The boycott marked the climax of Sunni rejectionism but also, paradoxically, the beginning of the end for the insurgency’s popular appeal, because it transformed what had hitherto been a numerically minimal element—AQI—into the dominant one.
The Sunni loss at the ballot box unsurprisingly coincided with a sharp uptick in attacks on “Shia” targets, which included state institutions and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). On February 28, 2005, a suicide bomb killed more than 120 people in the Shia-majority city of Hilla, just south of Baghdad, targeting young men tendering job applications with the ISF. In the crucial border town of Tal Afar, which jihadists used as a gateway to import foreign fighters from Syria, AQI ethnically cleansed mixed communities, “attacking playgrounds and schoolyards and soccer fields,” as Colonel Herbert “H. R.” McMaster later recalled. In one horrifying instance, they used two mentally disabled girls—ages three and thirteen—as suicide bombers to blow up a police recruitment line.
THE DESERT PROTECTORS
Military progress in Iraq began as improvisation—the innovative thinking of local military actors who apprehended early on that the war for “hearts and minds” wouldn’t be won by adhering to a strategy cooked up by strategists who stayed in the Green Zone or, in some cases, inside the walls of the Pentagon. Integral to the
Naji was using the time-honored jihadist example of Egypt, but he was also implicitly referring to Iraq, where he urged the fast consolidation of jihadist victory in order to “take over the surrounding countries.” One ISIS-affiliated cleric told us that Naji’s book is widely circulated among provincial ISIS commanders and some rank-and-file fighters as a way to justify beheadings as not only religiously permissible but recommended by God and his prophet. For ISIS, The Management of Savagery ’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious matters. Naji at one point lectures the reader, arguing that the way jihad is taught “on paper” makes it harder for young mujahidin to understand the true meaning of the concept. “One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening (others), and massacring. I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them. . . .[H]e cannot continue to fight and move from one stage to another unless the beginning stage contains a stage of massacring the enemy and making him homeless. . . .”
THE SUNNI BOYCOTT
To succeed in Iraq, al-Zarqawi needed to both massacre and dispossess the enemy (the Shia and Americans) and keep Sunnis divested of any stake in what he saw as their conspiratorial project: the creation of a democratic Iraqi government. Both the Baathists and the Zarqawists undertook a campaign to enforce a Sunni boycott of the forthcoming January 2005 Iraqi election. It worked.Less than 1 percent of Sunnis cast ballots in a key province in central Iraq—Anbar. The result conformed exactly to the dire scenario outlined by al-Zarqawi in his letter a year earlier: the Shia parties won the election by an overwhelming percentage, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Dawa Party candidate who had received millions in campaign funding from Iran, became prime minister in a government that would draft Iraq’s new constitution and thus determine the country’s postwar fate. The boycott marked the climax of Sunni rejectionism but also, paradoxically, the beginning of the end for the insurgency’s popular appeal, because it transformed what had hitherto been a numerically minimal element—AQI—into the dominant one.
The Sunni loss at the ballot box unsurprisingly coincided with a sharp uptick in attacks on “Shia” targets, which included state institutions and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). On February 28, 2005, a suicide bomb killed more than 120 people in the Shia-majority city of Hilla, just south of Baghdad, targeting young men tendering job applications with the ISF. In the crucial border town of Tal Afar, which jihadists used as a gateway to import foreign fighters from Syria, AQI ethnically cleansed mixed communities, “attacking playgrounds and schoolyards and soccer fields,” as Colonel Herbert “H. R.” McMaster later recalled. In one horrifying instance, they used two mentally disabled girls—ages three and thirteen—as suicide bombers to blow up a police recruitment line.
THE DESERT PROTECTORS
Military progress in Iraq began as improvisation—the innovative thinking of local military actors who apprehended early on that the war for “hearts and minds” wouldn’t be won by adhering to a strategy cooked up by strategists who stayed in the Green Zone or, in some cases, inside the walls of the Pentagon. Integral to the
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