Free The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn Page A

government forces on a peace camp at Hawijah, southwest of Kirkuk, on April 23 killed fifty people and injured 110, alienating many Sunni, including powerful tribes. Ill-planned government counteroffensives, which often meant detaining and mistreating all Sunni men of military age, proved counter-effective. Sporadic shelling of Fallujah and Ramadi by government forces in Anbar forced some 500,000 people out of a total population of 1.6 million in the province to flee to safer places where they often had to live rough or with whole families crammed into a single room.
    All along the upper Euphrates River, food becamescarce and expensive and many schools were closed. The most important Sunni religious leader in Anbar, Abdul Malik al-Saadi, who had previously counseled moderation, insisted that the April 2014 parliamentary elections were illegitimate.
    In the months leading up to its general offensive in June 2014, there was some uncertainty about the degree of control ISIS had over Sunni areas. Sometimes it chose to advertise its strength and sometimes not. Its takeover of Mosul, and the ease with which it occurred, was clearly a major symbolic victory for the jihadists, showing both their own effectiveness and the fragility of Iraq’s enormous security forces.
    However, the details of what precisely happened in the city remain cloudy because of a lack of reliable reporting on the ground, something that is unsurprising given the assassination campaign against local media that had taken place. Five journalists were killed in the six months after October 2013 and forty others had fled to Kurdistan and Turkey. Mukhtars, community leaders who are often the most important of the government’s representatives, were also attacked, forcing them to flee the city or to cooperate with ISIS. Minorities such as the Yazidis and Christians were targeted as well.
    Mosul is of particular importance to ISIS because it was the home of many families that joined the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein, who traditionally picked his defense minister from the city. Brutal as ISIS fighters may be, for many in Mosul they are preferable to Maliki’s Shia-dominant government forces. ISIS has been careful not to alienate the local population. ISIS spokesperson Abu Mohammed al-Adnani warned fighters to behave moderately towards the Sunni population, even those who may previously have fought on the government side. “Accept repentance and recantations from those who are sincere, and do not bother those who do not bother you, and forgive your Sunni folk, and be gentle with your tribes,” he said. It remains to be seen if this approach will work. Mosul is a traditional, conservative city, but not an intensely religious one, and it is difficult to imagine ISIS ruling it without creating friction.
    The surge in ISIS control in Sunni Iraq has happened rapidly, and there is little sign thus far of an effective government counterattack. The slaughter of Shia civilians continues, with a suicide bomber in a minivan packed with explosives killing 45 and wounding 157 people at a security checkpoint at the entrance to the largely Shia town of Hilla, southwest of Baghdad, as recently as March 2014. Government security is incapable of findingand eliminating the hideouts where these devastating vehicle-born bombs are rigged.
    There may be another less obvious reason for the spectacular resurgence of ISIS. According to one senior Iraqi source, the reemergence of ISIS was significantly aided in 2011 and 2012 by Turkish military intelligence that encouraged experienced Iraqi officers, who may have participated in guerrilla war against the US occupation, to work with the movement. This might be dismissed as one more Middle East conspiracy theory, but a feature of jihadi-type movements is the ease with which they can be manipulated by foreign intelligence services.
    Speaking of Iraq early in 2013, Dr. Mahmoud Othman, the veteran MP, said that “about half the country is not