ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan
Authors: Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan
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them, which is true to this day. So al-Masri and al-Baghdadi simply intensified their PR. Ultimately, they resorted to killing jihadists who didn’t join ISI in order to take over their operational territory. It was rather like a mafia turf war.”
In keeping with its name, the Islamic State of Iraq also transformed the Mujahideen Shura Council’s remit by creating and populating various other “ministries” such as one for agriculture, oil, and health. It was nation-building, or at least giving that impression. Most controversially, al-Masri, while reaffirming his commitment to bin Laden, also made bayat to al-Baghdadi, placing AQI hierarchically under the patronage of a newly formed umbrella. In jihadist terms, this was like taking a mistress and presenting her as your second wife to your first.
Al-Masri was indeed trying to have it both ways: to remain the emir of AQI while also flirting with outright secession from it to command his own independent operation in Iraq. It wasn’t until ISIS formally broke with al-Zawahiri in early 2014 that the deep and irreparable fissure created by al-Baghdadi’s pretensions of statehood and al-Masri’s subordination of his faction to ISI was at last revealed—by a very angry Ayman al-Zawahiri. In May 2014 he issued a statement in which he quoted an unknown third party who had characterized al-Baghdadi and al-Masri as “repulsive” fools. If al-Qaeda had ever reserved such animadversions for al-Zarqawi, it never publicized them.
THE NEW VBIEDS
The rise of ISI also coincided with the rise in frequency, and sophistication, of VBIED attacks. According to Jessica Lewis McFate, an Iraq analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, one reason whyISIS today projects a much larger military strength than it actually has owes to its expert use of these devices. Not only is the carnage from VBIED bombings extensive, but the weapon is as much about psychologically discombobulating the enemy in advance of a major military push. “We see them at checkpoints mostly,” Lewis said. “We’re looking more at VBIEDs or suicide VBIEDs as a tool to catalyst an attack or drive tension for an one. So, for instance, ISIS will conduct a VBIED bombing somewhere in Baghdad or along the Euphrates River Valley, and then will test to see how the Iraqi Security Forces and Shia militias respond to those attacks.”
From 2006 onward al-Masri had specialized in pursuing these kinds of attacks in and around Baghdad; factories for the outfitting of cars and trucks with ordnance were discovered in the Baghdad “belts”—the towns and villages that surrounded the capital and where, up until the “surge,” the United States had maintained a relatively light footprint.
ISI divided Baghdad and the belts into six zones, five centered around the city. Each zone was ruled by its own local emir. Digital intelligence on ISI, obtained in a JSOC raid, found that one such emir, Abu Ghazwan, who lorded over the thirty-thousand-man town of Tarmiya, managed a number of AQI cells in northern Iraq, including ones that were recruiting women and children for suicide bombing missions. Abu Ghazwan was also intimately acquainted with the schedules of US and Iraqi patrol units, how to avoid them, and how to lay traps for them. The Wall Street Journal reported that in mid-February 2007, a “massive truck bomb sheared off the front of the soldiers’ base in Tarmiya, sending concrete and glass flying through the air like daggers. The soldiers at the small outpost spent the next four hours fighting for their lives against a force of 70 to 80 insurgents.” (More recently, ISIS has targeted Tarmiya with VBIED attacks: in June 2014 it blew up the houses of high-ranking Iraqi Security Forces personnel and a former tribal Awakening leader.)
Abu Ghazwan’s overview of how his mini emirate functioned suggested that ISI wasn’t just using Tarmiya as a base of terror operations—it was actively building a statelet. “We are
In keeping with its name, the Islamic State of Iraq also transformed the Mujahideen Shura Council’s remit by creating and populating various other “ministries” such as one for agriculture, oil, and health. It was nation-building, or at least giving that impression. Most controversially, al-Masri, while reaffirming his commitment to bin Laden, also made bayat to al-Baghdadi, placing AQI hierarchically under the patronage of a newly formed umbrella. In jihadist terms, this was like taking a mistress and presenting her as your second wife to your first.
Al-Masri was indeed trying to have it both ways: to remain the emir of AQI while also flirting with outright secession from it to command his own independent operation in Iraq. It wasn’t until ISIS formally broke with al-Zawahiri in early 2014 that the deep and irreparable fissure created by al-Baghdadi’s pretensions of statehood and al-Masri’s subordination of his faction to ISI was at last revealed—by a very angry Ayman al-Zawahiri. In May 2014 he issued a statement in which he quoted an unknown third party who had characterized al-Baghdadi and al-Masri as “repulsive” fools. If al-Qaeda had ever reserved such animadversions for al-Zarqawi, it never publicized them.
THE NEW VBIEDS
The rise of ISI also coincided with the rise in frequency, and sophistication, of VBIED attacks. According to Jessica Lewis McFate, an Iraq analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, one reason whyISIS today projects a much larger military strength than it actually has owes to its expert use of these devices. Not only is the carnage from VBIED bombings extensive, but the weapon is as much about psychologically discombobulating the enemy in advance of a major military push. “We see them at checkpoints mostly,” Lewis said. “We’re looking more at VBIEDs or suicide VBIEDs as a tool to catalyst an attack or drive tension for an one. So, for instance, ISIS will conduct a VBIED bombing somewhere in Baghdad or along the Euphrates River Valley, and then will test to see how the Iraqi Security Forces and Shia militias respond to those attacks.”
From 2006 onward al-Masri had specialized in pursuing these kinds of attacks in and around Baghdad; factories for the outfitting of cars and trucks with ordnance were discovered in the Baghdad “belts”—the towns and villages that surrounded the capital and where, up until the “surge,” the United States had maintained a relatively light footprint.
ISI divided Baghdad and the belts into six zones, five centered around the city. Each zone was ruled by its own local emir. Digital intelligence on ISI, obtained in a JSOC raid, found that one such emir, Abu Ghazwan, who lorded over the thirty-thousand-man town of Tarmiya, managed a number of AQI cells in northern Iraq, including ones that were recruiting women and children for suicide bombing missions. Abu Ghazwan was also intimately acquainted with the schedules of US and Iraqi patrol units, how to avoid them, and how to lay traps for them. The Wall Street Journal reported that in mid-February 2007, a “massive truck bomb sheared off the front of the soldiers’ base in Tarmiya, sending concrete and glass flying through the air like daggers. The soldiers at the small outpost spent the next four hours fighting for their lives against a force of 70 to 80 insurgents.” (More recently, ISIS has targeted Tarmiya with VBIED attacks: in June 2014 it blew up the houses of high-ranking Iraqi Security Forces personnel and a former tribal Awakening leader.)
Abu Ghazwan’s overview of how his mini emirate functioned suggested that ISI wasn’t just using Tarmiya as a base of terror operations—it was actively building a statelet. “We are
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