Free ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan Page A

captain,” a former top US military official told us. “He was a Sioux. He didn’t know shit about Anbar or Iraq. He got out there, and he understood it immediately. The Iraqis could see he knew what was going on, and they loved him for it.”
    For Derek Harvey, understanding the way Iraq’s tribes functioned was the key to all mythologies in understanding Iraq itself. “There were a lot of regime organizations that we didn’t figure out very well. The key person might not have been the head guy, but the second or third guy—and this rule of not knowing exactly who’s running the show applied to the Saddamists as much as it applies to ISIS today. The tribes had professional and in some cases religious networks that determined informal hierarchies in everything that happened in that country. Our difficulty was in learning who did what.”

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    AGENTS OF CHAOS
    IRAN AND AL-QAEDA
    Iraqi’s Sunnis had just as much of a learning curve to adapt to as did the US military. Having squandered most of their political power through a disastrous boycott of the January 2005 election, they were not about to repeat the blunder again at the one in December 2005. The about-face was statistically staggering. In December, in Ramadi, Sunni voter turnout was around 80 percent, whereas in January it had been a measly 2 percent. The letdown, then, was commensurately disappointing. Shia political blocs again came out on top, albeit with a small margin of victory, which did little to dissuade many Sunnis of the conspiracy theory that al-Zarqawi had cleverly capitalized on and that suddenly appeared wholly realized: an Iranian-American alliance was purposefully keeping them from their rightful place as the true masters and custodians of Baghdad.
    Sunni participation in the December election also had another disconcerting side effect: because many of the more nationalistic or “moderate” insurgents quit the battlefield in favor of trying their luckat the ballot box, AQI’s role in Iraq’s terrorism grew more concentrated. Additionally, less moderate non-AQI insurgents, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades (named for Iraq’s anticolonial uprising against the British in that same year). And though Jaysh al-Islami (the Islamic Army), was vying with the Zarqawists for control of territory in Mosul, it was not yet ready to abandon Sunni rejectionism for reconciliation. AQI’s overreach had alienated many, but al-Zarqawi was still able to exploit demographic anxieties, which long predated the war.
    Kanan Makiya, a scholar of Baathist Iraq, had forecast a dire scenario for a post-Baathist state in his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence : “After Saddam is gone, when people’s lives and those of their loved ones look as if they are on the chopping block, Sunni fears of what the Shi’a might do to them in the name of Islam are going to become the major force of Iraqi politics. The more Iraq’s Shi’a assert themselves as Shi’a, the greater will be the tendency of Iraq’s Sunni minority to fight to the bitter end before allowing anything that so much as smells of an Islamic republic to be established in Iraq. They see in such a state—whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant—their own annihilation.”
    Al-Zarqawi’s choice to Iraq’s Sunnis was therefore “My barbarism or theirs.” In order to make his option even more persuasive, he needed to dispel one of the greatest liabilities to AQI’s popular appeal—its perception as a foreigner’s jihadist army. He thus needed to “Iraqize” his franchise. In January 2006 al-Zarqawi announced the creation of the Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin fi al-Iraq (the Mujahidin Advisory Council of Iraq). Initially, this consortium consisted of six different Salafist groups, five of which were Iraqi in composition, leaving AQI as the sole outlier, albeit with central control over the council’s operations. Contributing to what was, in effect, a new marketing or “branding” strategy for takfirism was the