By Alexis Debat
The National Interest, Summer 2004
ONE OF THE most crucial and controversial questions confronting Western counter-terrorism analysts revolves around the possible transformation of Iraq from an obscure footnote to a crucial battlefield in the War on Terror. The recent fighting in Fallujah has shed a new light on a category of insurgents that coalition officials refer to as "foreign fighters", whose ideological identity strikes at the heart of this line of argument. Until recently understood as a disparate group of several hundred non-Iraqis, the "foreign fighter" phenomenon has recently emerged as a more cohesive force, structured around a core of Islamic militants themselves a product of the Sunni-jihadist underground that gave the world Chechnya and Afghanistan. This has led the Bush Administration to reassess their potential to destabilize Iraq after the "handover of sovereignty" on June 30, especially in the wake of the recent uprising in the Sunni areas.
While relatively irrelevant from a military point of view, the basic question of how many jihadists are currently operating in Iraq could have devastating political implications. Depending on its scale and quality, Iraq's mujabeddin factor is either an anomaly or a tumor, a marginal and strictly military glitch, or the opening of the deadliest chapter yet in the War on Terror.
WE HAVE some statistics to help us sort through this morass. Approximately 300 individuals carrying non-Iraqi passports have been arrested by U.S. forces, Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi police in the past 14 months, according to senior U.S. military sources. The first wave of these "foreign fighters" (between April and October 2003), was mainly composed of Arab volunteers from neighboring countries, most of them Palestinian refugees enlisted to enter the struggle either by the remnants of the Iraqi mukhabarat or any number of terrorist organizations before and during the war in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
The second wave, which seems to be growing in size, is composed mostly of Islamic militants recruited throughout Europe and the Middle East and then sent to Iraq through the same elaborate human pipeline used by the mujaheddin to send volunteers to the Balkans, Chechnya and Afghanistan in the 1990s. (1) On November 19, 2003, the New York Times quoted American government sources as estimating the "foreign fighters phenomenon" to number between 1,000 and 3,000 individuals. A more reasonable approximation currently being floated by U.S. and British intelligence analysts puts the overall force at between 300 and 500 "foreign volunteers", most of them Islamic militants, and spread in small cells of between five and eight operatives. This fits the modus operandi of AI-Qaeda and its affiliates.
THE SECOND wave of "foreign fighters" poses a major threat to U.S. strategic goals in Iraq. Once poorly structured and exclusively military in nature, this cluster is now streamlining around a few organizations linked to foreign jihadist networks strongly intent on investing in the future of the country's Sunni minority past the June 30 handover. According to European and American intelligence sources, Ansar Al-Islam leads this second wave of "foreign fighters." Founded in Afghanistan's Herat training camp around 1998, this international terrorist organization is loosely affiliated with Al-Qaeda, which some experts say it aspires to succeed. Ansar Al-Islam has a strong history of activity in Iraq, where it operated training camps in the country's northeast before the war, beyond the reach of Saddam Hussein, and along the border with Iran, where some of its members have sought refuge in the past year. But its reach is impressive: The group has been mentioned in just about every terrorist plot uncovered in Europe in the past 15 months. With its infrastructure damaged in Iraq, the organization has retreated to Georgia, Turkey and western Europe, where it is re-organizing its networks around one objective: recruiting and sending dozens of volunteers to fight under the banner of its new Iraqi branch, Jaish Ansar Al-Sunna.
According to senior British intelligence officials, Ansar's Iraqi branch was formally established last November in Baghdad with a goal to promote the group's radical interpretation of Tawhid against the "infidel" Christians and Shi'a involved in the new Iraq. (2) The organization is reported to rely on between 100 and 150 members operating mainly in Kurdistan, as well as the Sunni triangle and the Baghdad area. Like other terrorist organizations in Al-Qaeda's orbit, it focuses on large suicide operations. (3) It has claimed responsibility for the February 1 bombings in the northern city of Irbil that killed 109 people, and the February 13 suicide attack on the police station in Kirkuk, which killed seven policemen. Assisting Ansar abroad is Al-Tawhid, a group established in Kabul in the late 1990s to provide support to Jordanian volunteers trained at Al-Qaeda's camps in Herat. Now operating largely out of the UK and Germany, it provides other jihadist groups with the logistical base necessary to smuggle scores of mujaheddin into Iraq since the fall of Saddam.
This connection is crucial: In a recent German intelligence document, one of Al-Tawhid's main operatives in Germany ranks the forging of passports as "the most important activity" of the organization in Europe. Almost all of these smuggling networks then run through safe-houses in Istanbul and Damascus, and on to Iraq with the help of smugglers operating along the porous border, especially in the many wadis of the Al-Qa'im district and in the vicinity of Al-Rutbah and Qusaybah, two longtime smuggling hubs. Volunteers from Middle Eastern countries also enter the country from Iran, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
These entry points offer a relatively safe and direct access to Al-Anbar province and the Sunni triangle, especially the flashpoint towns of Ramadi and Fallujah, as well as Baghdad's Al-Moalemeen and Yarmuk neighborhoods, where these Sunni jihadists can then disappear into the Ba'athi underground.
Both Ansar and Al-Tawhid are headed by a 38 year-old Jordanian Bedouin known as Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who took responsibility for the beheading of Nicholas Berg in retaliation for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners in May (in fact, it is highly probable that he was the actual executioner). A former protege of Omar Ibn Al-Khattab and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in Afghanistan, Ahmad Fadl Al-Khalayleh--his real name--has been linked directly or indirectly to about two dozen terrorist plots worldwide since 1999, as well as several suicide bombings in Iraq and a foiled chemical plot in Baghdad in late January. (4) Despite his extensive training in Afghanistan-especially with chemical weapons--and his past allegiance to Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi is establishing himself both as an alternative and a successor to Osama bin Laden.
Intercepted communications between what senior Middle Eastern intelligence officials believe to be the two terrorists have Bin Laden acknowledging Zarqawi as being at the "forefront" of the global jihad, and as leading the "vanguard of the jihad in Iraq." These same intelligence officials have evidence that Zarqawi was detained by Iranian intelligence in autumn 2001 and that he was kept in a secured location along with Sail Al-Adl, Suleiman Abu Graith and Saad bin Laden, all high level Al-Qaeda lieutenants. Around the new year, Zarqawi crossed into Iraq and then into Turkey and Syria, where he met up with his main deputy, Abu Ghaadiyh, in Aleppo. In March 2002, he crossed back into Iran, where he was again taken into the custody of the Islamic Republic's intelligence services and transported to Tehran. At that time, it appears likely that he accepted Iran's offer to provide him with material and logistical support, and was given orders to go to Iraq and attack the Americans. Soon thereafter, he returned to Iraq to lay the foundation for the establishment of Jaish Ansar Al-Sunna.
Zarqawi's intention to commit acts of terror inside Iraq has been further confirmed by the capture of two of his top lieutenants in January 2004. One of them, Hassan Guhl, a Pakistani veteran of Al-Qaeda operations captured in Kurdistan, was carrying a CD-ROM allegedly containing a 17-page "progress report" from Zarqawi to the leadership of Al-Qaeda which claimed that the group had been responsible for 25 terrorist attacks (almost all major assaults against U.S. forces) and solicited Bin Laden's consent and support to turn Iraq into a "field of jihad", in part by stirring up religious strife between the Sunnis and the Shi'a. If genuine, the letter is another piece of evidence that suggests Zarqawi is planning to use Jaish Ansar A-Sunna as a vehicle for his premeditated "third act" in Iraq. (5)
ANOTHER consequence of the Iraq War one year on is the post facto alliance between the heretofore fiercely independent foreign mujaheddin (and, in particular, Zarqawi's men) and the remnants of their former enemy, the Ba'ath Party. This alliance is much less artificial than it appears. Contrary to popular belief, radical Wahhabi militants had built a powerful, if discreet, movement in Iraq through the 1980s and 1990s. Centering on several mosques, like Ibn Taymiyah in Yarmuk, this fundamentalist Sunni underground was built around a handful of charismatic clerics such as Madhi Al-Soumaydai, who is now considered its main leader. Despite Saddam's ruthless repression, this movement not only survived but thrived, thanks to Saudi funds and the popular appeal of Islam facilitated by the considerable impoverishment of the country due to the 1990s sanctions regime and consequent criminalization of the Iraqi economy. It built a small but powerful following in the army, even enlisting one of the generals heading the mukhabarat (reportedly married to a member of Saddam's clan). When the regime collapsed, these officers openly joined the movement and now manage the crucial interface between the Ba'athi underground and the jihadists. (When coalition forces raided Ibn Taymiyah in January and arrested Al-Soumaydai and 31 suspected "foreign fighters", they uncovered a large cache of weaponry and explosives.)
Indeed, U.S. intelligence sources suspect that former officers of the mukhabarat's M14 section (responsible for monitoring the activities of terrorist groups inside Iraq and beyond) have used their experience in navigating the intricate Sunni fundamentalist underground of the Middle East to co-opt some of them with the rhetoric of protecting Iraq's "Sunni identity" against the Shi'a and the Iranian threat.
On the ground, the strategy of integrating the fundamentalists with the secularists has made it difficult to assign blame to specific groups for particular terror operations inside Iraq. But as the attacks multiplied and the resources devoted to tracking Saddam and his elusive WMD were reassigned to fight the insurgency, U.S. intelligence analysts have been able to build a general typology. Most of the small-scale but deadly roadside bombings, sniper and RPG attacks against coalition troops are the work of a mixture of former regime elements, Arab volunteers and ordinary Iraqis; by contrast, most of the large-scale suicide bombings have been squarely attributed to groups dominated or heavily infiltrated by Islamic militants. (6)
This suggests a rigorous division of labor between Ba'ath types and jihadists, in which the former provide money, explosives and logistics while the latter provide the foot soldiers and suicide bombers. Radical Islamic militants have also been suspected in less-deadly and high-profile attacks, such as the shelling of the Al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad during Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's visit in October 2003, as well as the attack against oil installations in Basra this past April. The recent wave of kidnappings of Westerners has also sometimes been attributed to these foreign jihadists, and CIA bomb-making experts have also noted a clear technical shift in the fabrication of the "improvised explosive devices" (IED) made by insurgents--and which have proven so deadly for U.S. and coalition forces--suggesting that they are now "jihadi-made."
NONE OF this is good news for the American-led coalition. Not only are terrorist organizations linked to the global mujaheddin underground slowly taking over the insurgency itself, but they are pushing to turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was before autumn 2001: a public relations windfall for their ideologues, a training ground for their "rookies", and even a safe-haven for their leadership. While this somber horizon is still taking shape, its potential implications must be thought through. Iraq's transformation into a new "field of jihad" will force the U.S. government to abandon the long-term requirements of building a modern and multi-confessional Iraq and focus on the short-term necessities of waging direct war on terror.
Another consequence of the Iraq War and the presence of the "foreign fighters" is the emergence of a common Sunni identity between former enemies, one that transcends ideological differences in the name not only of the defense of the Sunni identity in Iraq (what the Ba'athi want) but also of its triumph over other religious and political forces (Shi'i and secularism). If the trend holds, two consequences emerge. First, it will jeopardize the Bush Administration's remaining democratic ambitions for Iraq this year and beyond. Second, it will throw the whole region's fragile ethnic and religious patchwork in a chaos of such proportions that the United States and its allies might have no alternative but to cultivate a new generation of Saddams: brutal dictators able to keep the region from imploding. To break the Sunni Islamist-Ba'athi alliance, the United States will need to revise significantly its democratic plans for Iraq by giving the Sunnis enough economic and political guarantees to ensure the viability of their entity in the face of considerable Shi'a and Kurdish resistance. (7)
Finally, the possibility that Zarqawi, a Sunni, has been turned by Shi'a Iran, that he has been annoited as the "vanguard of the jihad in Iraq" by Bin Laden, and that the head of Wahhabist and therefore Sunni Al-Qaeda is aware of Zarqawi's Iranian support-system, should send shivers down our collective spines. This development, if true, will require the intelligence community and policymakers to rethink many of their deepest-held understandings of the region's dynamics.
THE IRAQ WAR has not up to now constituted a step forward in the War on Terror. Quite the contrary, it has complicated the global efforts begun well before 9/11 to disrupt and destroy radical jihadist networks throughout the Greater Middle East and beyond. Indeed, the Pentagon's blind ambition for Iraq has fostered a resistance movement armed with more concrete, deadlier and (unfortunately) more realistic plans for the country than anything that the Department of Defense's luminaries have so far devised.
More broadly, the logic of the Bush Administration's rhetoric of freedom for the Middle East betrays a fundamental misreading of the War on Terror's cultural dimension. Not only has Al-Qaeda taken terrorism beyond its initial function as a vehicle for resistance, it has turned it into a global instrument by which to challenge not only Western influence in the Muslim world but the West itself. In this new and global "clash of uniqueness", success is not measured in the number of rogue states overthrown or militants arrested or killed, but by the number of young Muslims who feed their hunger for an identity with the teachings of Jefferson and Montesquieu rather than those of a Mohamed Ibn Al-Wahhab. Triumph will lie in the capacity of our thinkers and political leaders to pull those young men and women away from the slogan printed on a flier circulating in radical Islamic mosques in Milan: "Leave this meaningless life and expect the highest rewards in heaven. The doors are open for new recruits."
If the second year of a free Iraq looks very much like the first, we are in for a long and bloody war indeed.
(1) First indoctrinated by "recruiters" in mosques in Europe and the Middle East with graphic videos praising suicide bombers and leaflets denouncing the "atrocities" committed by U.S. forces in Iraq (rendered more credible by the pictures coming out of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal), the volunteers are then turned over to an elaborate network of "facilitators", whose technical and financial resources, as well as their wide-ranging international connections, ensure a relatively safe journey to Iraq.
(2) Tawhid refers to the unity of Allah as the one and only God. While the Quran states that all religions (including Christianity and Judaism) revealed to the prophets have the same essence and knowledge of Tawhid, Wahhabis consider that the logic of Tawhid immediately turns Christians, Jews and Shi'a into mortal enemies of "pure" Islam.
(3) U.S. troops have so far recovered stockpiles of as many as 500 "suicide vests", including approximately 200 found in a safe house used by Jaish Al-Ansar Al-Sunna in Fallujah last April, along with a few dozen pounds of explosive, and several American uniforms.
(4) Khattab went on to become "one of Chechnya's most powerful warlords", as Yevgeny Primakov writes in his new book, A World Challenged (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
(5) Zarqawi's networks operate alongside other, smaller jihadi organizations such as the Mujahedi Al-Salafiyah, an offshoot of the Algerian Salafist Group for Call and Combat, which has sent a few dozen volunteers to Iraq since January. An increasing number of jihadists from the Gulf are also teaming up with some of the rich and well-equipped Ba'athi resistance organizations, such as Jaish Mohamed (Army of Mohamed), towards which many Saudi volunteers seem to have been drawn.
(6) Among the most prominent, we find the August 2003 bombings of the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters in Baghdad; the car bombing of the Imam All mosque in Najaf, which killed Ayatollah Mohamed Baqir Al-Hakim; the bombing of the Italian paramilitary police headquarters in Nasiriya in November 2003; the New Year Eve's bombing of a popular restaurant in Baghdad's Karrada district; the bombing outside the U.S. occupation headquarters in Baghdad in January 2004; the February 2004 suicide bombing against the of the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Erbil; and the suicide attack on the police station in Kirkuk. They are also heavily suspected of involvement in the Ashura bombings in Najaf in early March. Most of these operations have involved vehicles (some, like the Tarmaz truck used in the UN bombing, smuggled from Syria) driven by suicide bombers, as well as a mix of conventional explosives and military ordinance stockpiled before and after the regime's downfall.
(7) We have already seen that change at play with turning over of Fallujah to General Jasi Mohamed Saleh, a former officer in the Ira Republican Guard, presumably in exchange for a crackdown on the "foreign fighters."
Alexis Debat, a former official in the French ministry of defense, is a consultant on terrorism for ABC News and a senior analyst for the Institut Montaigne in France. He is at work on a comprehensive history of the Central Intelligence Agency.
------------------------------------------
Citation: Alexis Debat. “Vivisecting the Jihad,” The National Interest, Summer 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nationalinterest.org/ME2/dirsect.asp?sid=9F1505F71C0C4575A13EA32C74EE29E5&nm=TNI+%2D+Subscribe+or+Sign+in
------------------------------------------