Daesh: Islamic State's Holy War

By Anthony Tucker-Jones

Anthony Tucker-Jones is only too familiar with the modern architects of terror. For the past decade and a half he has worked as the terrorism and security correspondent for the highly respected intersec The Journal of International Security. During that time he has written extensively on al Qaeda and Daesh. This book draws on his experience to assess Islamic States brutal Holy War that has brought terror and mayhem to the four corners of the globe.The emergence of terror group Islamic State, or Daesh, has created one of the greatest threats to global security in the twenty-first century. Spawned from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, it carved out an Islamic caliphate straddling both failed countries. Since then it has wantonly despoiled world heritage sites, engaged in regional genocide and conducted regular terror attacks against capital cities across the world, killing irrespective of race, color, creed, gender or age.Like its predecessor, al Qaeda, Daeshs most potent and insidious weapon is franchise terrorism. It has inspired clutches of deadly wannabee terrorists who have carried out a wave of what can be best described as war crimes, killing innocent civilians. In this perceptive assessment Tucker-Jones highlights how the West has become caught up in what is essentially a civil war between Shia and Sunni Islam, with deadly results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526728821

Anthony Tucker-Jones

ANTHONY TUCKER-JONES spent nearly twenty years in the British Intelligence Community before establishing himself as a defence writer and military historian. He has written extensively on aspects of Second World War warfare, including Hitler’s Great Panzer Heist and Stalin’s Revenge: Operation Bagration.

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INTRODUCTION: THE IRAQI WELLSPRING

The emergence of terror group Islamic State, or Daesh, created one of the greatest threats to global security in the 21st century. Born of the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, it carved out an Islamic Caliphate straddling both prostrate countries. Since then its acolytes have wantonly despoiled world heritage sites and conducted regular terror attacks against capital cities, killing irrespective of race, age, colour or creed. Like its predecessor, al-Qaeda, Daesh’s most potent and insidious weapon is franchise terrorism. It has inspired a whole series of deadly wanabee terrorists who had carried out a wave of what can be best described as war crimes, killing innocent civilians.

Osama bin Laden, the late leader of al-Qaeda, dreamed of the return of the 7th-century Islamic Caliphate that once stretched across the Middle East and North Africa. Such aspirations were delusional in the face of the realities of geopolitics—or so everyone thought. Sunni al-Qaeda after it was driven from Afghanistan was superseded by its successor al-Qaeda in-Iraq. While the former had a very global anti-Western agenda, the latter was a much more regional player with an overtly anti-Shia stance. Similarly, sister organizations al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula also emerged as regional players tapping into the historic split between Shia and Sunni Islam.

While some commentators assessed that al-Qaeda was a generational movement that would eventually lose steam, few could have foreseen that it would morph into something far deadlier, or indeed that the Arab Spring would fail to address the simmering socio-economic discontent feeding militant Islam. In fact frustration over the failure of the Arab Spring antagonized the Shia–Sunni split to newfound levels of violence.

The new boy on the block, known variously as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – abbreviated to Islamic State or IS, proved to be more than a worthy successor to bin Laden’s original al-Qaeda. Experts rightly argue that it is not a state but a terrorist organization with an Islamist agenda; however, it managed to very successfully carve out a very disparate kingdom across the Middle East and North Africa firmly ruled by Sharia law.

One thing that is clear: Daesh thrived off the carcasses of failed states in an arc stretching from Libya to Yemen. Thanks to weak central governments the reality of an Islamist body politic taking power came to pass. Daesh in the summer of 2014 declared a caliphate in the territories of Iraq and Syria under its control. The Caliphate’s leader was called ‘Caliph Ibrahim’, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Western governments responded by treating IS as if it were a state, conducting airstrikes against military targets within the vast tracts of land IS had seized across Iraq and Syria.

Terrorism has blighted the Middle East since the Second World War. (via author)

The Caliphate gained a firm foothold in the Middle East (including the Arabian Peninsula), North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. In war-torn Syria Daesh continued to dominate the agenda and effectively paralyzed any Western desire to broker a peaceful solution between the rebels and President Assad’s regime. The group proved particularly adept at stealing recruits from other Syrian Islamist factions, most notably Jabhat al-Nura. It was a policy it repeated in Libya and Iraq.

The Caliphate capitalized on the Shia–Sunni civil war and powerful regional players fuelled the conflict, with Saudi Arabia championing the Sunnis and Iran backing the Shia. In Iraq the Daesh victory in the north was almost certainly facilitated by the defection of the Sunni elements of the Iraqi armed forces and the flight of Shia recruits south. The very fact that the Iraqi military was not able to conduct a swift or decisive counteroffensive across the country was clear testimony to the division within its ranks. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government knew that there was no easy way to placate Iraq’s disaffected Sunni minority even if many of them hated and feared Daesh. In the meantime the Caliphate continued to fill the vacuum.

Daesh was soon to find that conquering territory and running an effective administration were two entirely different things. Revenues from looted antiquities and oil sold on the black market did not prop up IS spending for long. All the time it was winning, recruits flocked to its banner, the first sign of defeat then its ranks became depleted. Daesh, despite its setback at Kobane in Syria, continued to launch attacks in Iraq. The boldness of these seemed to know no limits. Then slowly the Caliphate began to crumble under pressure from the Iraqi government and its Western allies. However, its ideology of hatred remained intact and the attacks in the West continued.

Disastrously for Iraq, while Washington had a very clear military strategy for bringing down Saddam Hussein, it exhibited an appalling lack of foresight when it came to overseeing the transition to a post-Saddam regime. As American political commentator Kevin Phillips noted. The supposed liberation of Iraq in 2003 unleashed guerrilla warfare and produced a massive anti-American surge in Islamic nations from North Africa to Indonesia. One side effect may have been to print recruiting posters for a generation of suicide bombers.

The presence of foreign fighters was first confirmed when Iraqi Kurdish militia supported by US Special Forces overran the Ansar al-Islam (The Partisans of Islam) base on 28 March 2008. Quite frankly it was a case of taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut as the operation involved around 8,000 Peshmerga Kurdish guerrillas. Despite these overwhelming numbers, Ansar fighters resisted at Dekon, Gulp and Vagorat as the Coalition forces approached their base. The Kurds suffered seventy-five wounded and twenty-four dead in just forty-eight hours. Although the operation was a success, only a handful of Ansar fighters were captured alive, including a Syrian and a Palestinian. Among the dead were Arabs from Yemen, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates; there were also some from undisclosed European countries. Captured documents showed links to Abu Sayyaf and Hamas.

From the very beginning the Iraqi insurgency had a very clear foreign fighter element. The bombing of the UN HQ in Baghdad on 19 August 2003 and the bombing of the Najaf Mosque on 29 August 2003 resulted in the US concentrating on Jordanian commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his foreign fighter network. He formally pledged allegiance to bin Laden and joined al-Qaeda in 2004. His strategy for ‘al-Qaeda in-Iraq’ was to provoke civil war between Iraq’s Shia and Sunni population in order to make the country ungovernable and drive the Americans out. It was believed that those foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq had formed an alliance with former members of Saddam’s intelligence services known as the Jaish Mohammed or Army of the Prophet Mohammed. This was headed by a senior Saudi al-Qaeda officer based at Razaza, thirty miles from the town of Ramadi. His support was derived from wealthy Saudis rather than the Saudi government itself. In the mind of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s present leader, Iraq was just a stepping-stone, It has always been my belief that the victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world, specifically the Levant, Egypt, and the neighbouring states of the peninsula and Iraq.

Lebanon became the birth place of Islamic militancy in the 1970s. (via author)

The Coalition tracked down al-Zarqawi to a safe house in Hibhib, near the city of Baqubah on 7 June 2006 and mortally wounded him in an airstrike. It was thought Abu Ayyub al-Masri might replace al-Zaqawi, but Islamist websites pledged allegiance to Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, though the Americans believed they had killed him as well. Bin Laden dispatched an aide, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, to al-Masri, but he was captured before even reaching Iraq. Just twelve days after the death of al-Zarqawi the Americans scored another success capturing Abu Mumam (alias Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi or Abu Rana) near Baqubah. Information gleaned from him resulted in the capture of another twenty al-Qaeda members. This was followed up by a series of Iraqi security operations that resulted in forty-nine al-Qaeda fighters being killed and another 225 captured.

Washington claimed that one of its main reasons for attacking Iraq was because of Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaeda and international terrorism. This rationale was based on alleged contact between al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan during the early 1990s. Critics argue that these meetings never happened. The Bush administration also cited the presence of Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq, which had links with Baghdad, might have been involved in 9/11 and subsequently evolved into al-Qaeda in-Iraq

Certainly throughout the 1970s and 1980s Iraq, Iran and Libya, as well as providing facilities for Palestinian and other terrorist groups, also sent their own agents abroad to carry out acts of terrorism. While Iran and Libya gained high-profile reputations as state sponsors of terrorism, Saddam Hussein quietly outstripped the others in employing terrorism against his own population. Perhaps a little ironically it was an Iraqi agent who masterminded the seizure of the Iranian embassy in London by Iranian Arabs in 1980. At home for a long time Saddam