ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan Page A

running the district, the people’s affairs, and the administrative services, and we have committees to run the district headed by my brother Abu Bakr,” he said with not a little self-satisfaction. Indeed, AQI’s occupation of Tarmiya was redolent of the kind of Islamic fief that had characterized Ansar al-Islam’s five-hundred-square-kilometer zone in Iraqi Kurdistan, or ISIS’s rule in the eastern Syrian province of Raqqa. Abu Ghazwan even had his municipal conveyances for his Tarmiya emirate. He drove around in a white Nissan truck confiscated from the Iraqi police force and repurposed as an ISI car. He also piloted a ferryboat taken from a water treatment plant along the Tigris River.
    Abu Ghazwan’s personal history also highlighted another alarming trend of ISI warfare—recidivism. He had once been a detainee of the coalition, as had another man by the name of Mazin Abu Abd al-Rahman, who was newly released from Camp Bucca, one of the largest US-run prisons in Iraq based in Basra and named for a New York City fire marshal who had perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11.
    As with al-Zarqawi’s Swaqa, Camp Bucca gained a deserved reputation for serving as much as a terrorist academy as a detention facility. Islamists reaffirmed their bona fides by preaching to the converted, but also by proselytizing to new inmates from the general population of criminals who may have gone into the clink as secularists or mildly religious, only to emerge as violent fundamentalists. In Bucca, al-Rahman not only learned the finer points of sharia, he also made friends with AQI bomb-makers and thus graduated from US custody as a new-minted expert in the construction of VBIEDs. Another AQI member later recalled how al-Rahman’s time in the facility also acquainted him with the necessary contactsto start his own jihadist cell in the northern Baghdad belt once he was released. As Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor recount: “It took [al-Rahman] and two other men two days to build each car bomb in the Tarmiya farmhouse they used as a workshop . . .using stolen cars driven up from a parking lot where they were stored in Adhamiya and a combination of plastic and homemade explosives. The evening before an attack, the completed car bomb would be driven from Tarmiya back into Baghdad, where it would be stored overnight in a parking lot or garage before the bomber drove it to its final destination and blew it up.”
    The founder of AQI had been found and killed thirteen miles away from JSOC’s headquarters at Balad Air Base. A major cottage industry for car bombs was thriving some forty miles north of Camp Victory.

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    THE AWAKENING
    IRAQIS TURN ON ISI
    “The history of the Anbar Awakening is very bitter,” a former high-ranking official in the Iraqi government told us toward the end of 2014. “The people who fought al-Qaeda were later abandoned by their government. Many of them were also executed by al-Qaeda, and some of them were even arrested by Iraqi forces. Until there is a perceivable change [in] the way business is done by Baghdad, I strongly doubt that people are willing to risk their lives and start something similar against ISIS.” His point, which is reflective of many Iraqi Sunnis we have interviewed, is better illuminated by the origins of the Awakening. Like most propitious discoveries, this one happened by accident.
    SAHWA
    The Desert Protectors program had been a short-lived but useful exercise in American alliance-building with the tribesmen of Ramadi. By 2006, however, the provincial capital of Anbar had fallen again to AQI’s dominance.
    The jihadists were so entrenched in the city that they resorted to US Army Corps of Engineers–type innovations for laying undetectable IEDs to deter or kill US and Iraqi columns. They used power saws to cut away large chunks of asphalt in the road and fill the resulting craters with ordnance before reapplying a seemingly untouched blacktop. To the naked eye, it looked like normal