Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer Page A
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Political Science, Modern, middle east, Terrorism, World, Islamic Studies, 21st Century, Middle Eastern
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resistance, and many confused people who had no ideawhy they were there. It was a pressure cooker where new links were forged and new ideas were explored. “We could never have got together like this in Baghdad,” said a senior officer in ISIS who was interviewed by Martin Chulov of the Guardian in 2014: “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaeda leadership.” Not only that, but the same compounds held many former senior Ba’athists, ex-military men and bureaucrats who had been fighting the American invaders in quite separate organizations. An alliance between the two groups would offer many advantages if it could be achieved, for the Ba’athists had precisely the professional military skills and the experience in running large state organizations that the ISI lacked.
Chulov’s informant, who used the pseudonym Abu Ahmed, had not known anything about Abu Bakr al Baghdadi before arriving at Camp Bucca, but was impressed by his calm and his charisma. It was the ideal place for Baghdadi to deploy his two most valuable assets—his PhD in Islamic theology and the fact that his family could claim a direct line of descent from the Prophet Muhammad—in order to gain the respect and trust of his fellow prisoners. At the same time, Baghdadi made himself useful to his American captors by mediating in quarrels between rival factions in the camp and keeping matters calm. “He was respected very much by the U.S. army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp, he could,but we couldn’t. And all the while a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no Islamic State now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.” 21
This new ideology was a radical departure from the ideas of Osama bin Laden and the other leaders of the original al Qaeda organization. Bin Laden was a cautious man who may not have expected to see such a thing as an “Islamic State” come to pass in his lifetime. His plans assumed that he was working for long-term results: first you have to attack the “far enemy” (the Western countries) and get them to invade Muslim countries; that will eventually radicalize the Muslim peoples so much that Islamist revolutions will become possible; and then, even after the revolutions, you have to proceed cautiously towards the ultimate goal of a restored caliphate, always aware that nationalists in every Muslim country will furiously resist being submerged in a pan-Islamic state that would erase their national identities. To use a Marxist analogy, if Osama bin Laden was Lenin, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was Pol Pot.
What Baghdadi was proposing was the creation of an “Islamic State” right here and now by means of military conquest. It wasn’t as rash an idea as it seemed, for two of bin Laden’s essential conditions had already been met: the infidel “Crusaders” had invaded Iraq, and the Sunnis of Iraq were pretty radicalized already as a result. Keeppushing down the same road for a few more years, be utterly ruthless in using violence to frighten people into submission, and there really could be an Islamic State here and now. It was a tremendously seductive message, delivered by someone far better educated in Islamic theology than most of his audience, and nobody minded that it would all have to be done by force. Practically all the states in the world before the twentieth century had been built by war (and well over 90 percent of them had ultimately been destroyed by war). Every traditional Islamic caliphate had been built by conquest, not by sweet persuasion. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Baghdadi would have known that taking this course would inevitably mean an eventual break with al Qaeda, but he didn’t necessarily dwell on that
Chulov’s informant, who used the pseudonym Abu Ahmed, had not known anything about Abu Bakr al Baghdadi before arriving at Camp Bucca, but was impressed by his calm and his charisma. It was the ideal place for Baghdadi to deploy his two most valuable assets—his PhD in Islamic theology and the fact that his family could claim a direct line of descent from the Prophet Muhammad—in order to gain the respect and trust of his fellow prisoners. At the same time, Baghdadi made himself useful to his American captors by mediating in quarrels between rival factions in the camp and keeping matters calm. “He was respected very much by the U.S. army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp, he could,but we couldn’t. And all the while a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no Islamic State now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.” 21
This new ideology was a radical departure from the ideas of Osama bin Laden and the other leaders of the original al Qaeda organization. Bin Laden was a cautious man who may not have expected to see such a thing as an “Islamic State” come to pass in his lifetime. His plans assumed that he was working for long-term results: first you have to attack the “far enemy” (the Western countries) and get them to invade Muslim countries; that will eventually radicalize the Muslim peoples so much that Islamist revolutions will become possible; and then, even after the revolutions, you have to proceed cautiously towards the ultimate goal of a restored caliphate, always aware that nationalists in every Muslim country will furiously resist being submerged in a pan-Islamic state that would erase their national identities. To use a Marxist analogy, if Osama bin Laden was Lenin, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was Pol Pot.
What Baghdadi was proposing was the creation of an “Islamic State” right here and now by means of military conquest. It wasn’t as rash an idea as it seemed, for two of bin Laden’s essential conditions had already been met: the infidel “Crusaders” had invaded Iraq, and the Sunnis of Iraq were pretty radicalized already as a result. Keeppushing down the same road for a few more years, be utterly ruthless in using violence to frighten people into submission, and there really could be an Islamic State here and now. It was a tremendously seductive message, delivered by someone far better educated in Islamic theology than most of his audience, and nobody minded that it would all have to be done by force. Practically all the states in the world before the twentieth century had been built by war (and well over 90 percent of them had ultimately been destroyed by war). Every traditional Islamic caliphate had been built by conquest, not by sweet persuasion. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Baghdadi would have known that taking this course would inevitably mean an eventual break with al Qaeda, but he didn’t necessarily dwell on that
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