Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer

election (which was boycotted by most Sunni Arabs). Nouri al Maliki, the prime minister who emerged after extensive political bargaining in 2006, governed in a relentlessly sectarian style that further alienated Sunni Arabs. His manner was somewhat moderated in his first term by the great influence of the American occupation forces, but after the election of 2009, with the American withdrawal just around the corner, it rapidly became more extreme. In particular, Maliki reneged on a promise to integrate the “Sons of Iraq,” the Sunni militias of the Awakening, into the Iraqi army: only 9,000 were accepted into the army, another 30,000 were given jobs in government ministries, and the rest, as many as 90,000 men, were just left out. Shia concerns about the long-term implications of an independent Sunni militia were quite understandable, but Maliki’s “solution” to the problem was a blunder as grave in its consequences as L. Paul Bremer’s decision to disband the entire Iraqi army from the Saddam Hussein era in 2003. Indeed, the consequences were almost identical: the re-emergence, post-2010, of an armed Sunni resistance to the Shia authorities in Baghdad. Which in turn opened the door for a restoration of the influence of al Qaeda in Iraq in the Sunni areas.

CHAPTER 6

JIHAD: IRAQ AND SYRIA, 2010–2013

 
    T he untimely demise of AQI’s leader, Abu Ayyub al Masri, and of Abu Omar al Baghdadi, the titular head of the “Islamic State of Iraq,” in April 2010 was a turning point for the organization: it was only four years from that nadir of its fortunes to its conquest of most of the Sunni areas of Iraq in the summer of 2014. The person most closely associated with that turnaround is Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who succeeded to the leadership of the ISI in the following month at the age of thirty-nine. (The name al Qaeda in Iraq was dropped shortly afterwards, and the division between the two organizations, never more than titular, was erased.)
    Abu Bakr al Baghdadi grew up in the small city of Samarra, a predominantly Sunni town. According to research done by the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and Germany’s ARD television channel, he was a mediocre student who had to repeat a year in school because his English was so bad, but he was a very good football player and a pious youth (the children to whom he gave Quran lessons called him “the believer”). He failed to gain admission to the law faculty of the University of Baghdad because of his poor marks, but the Islamic University of Baghdadaccepted him into the theology faculty in 1991. He graduated eight years later with a PhD in Islamic theology, and he appears to have passed the remaining four years of Saddam’s rule as a junior cleric at a mosque in the Baghdad suburb of Tobchi.
    The American invasion in 2003 galvanized him, and he promptly helped to found Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamaah (Army of the Followers of the Sunnah and the Community), a small “army” of militants who began launching attacks on U.S. troops, although, as the head of the Shari’ah committee, Baghdadi probably did not see combat. He was arrested by U.S. forces in February 2004 and imprisoned as a “civilian internee” at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq near the Kuwait border. American intelligence had little or nothing on him, however, and he was not seen as particularly dangerous—just another of the thousands of Iraqi men swept up in various raids and held without charge for looking suspicious. But it was probably his eleven months there that transformed him from an outraged Islamic scholar into a militant and ruthless terrorist leader.
    Camp Bucca was a terrorist university. Jihadis who spent time there—and there are thousands of them—still refer to it as “The Academy.” Divided into about twenty separate compounds, it held 22,000 people at its peak, including Islamist militants, ex-Ba’athist bureaucrats and army officers who were suspected of being active in the