The fall of Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, to the Islamic State last month has frayed nerves in Washington, but what few appear to grasp is that ISIS’s May offensive has given Ramadi back to its former owners — the ex-Baathist Sunni terrorists known as the Former Regime Loyalists. The FRLs, as they’re called, were Saddam Hussein’s most ardent followers, the same fighters whom the United States fought non-stop for eight years. Their resurgence has implications not just for the United States but for ISIS itself. For while these forces may fly the ISIS flag today, their ultimate plans for Iraq are quite different than those of the “caliphate.”
ISIS’s roots in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party are deep — many of the group’s most devoted commanders, advisers and fighters started out as Baathists. The ex-Baathists essentially run ISIS, and their past is evident in the tactics they are using now.
After the 1963 coup that first gave the Baathists a share of power in Iraq’s government, Saddam became head of the secret Jehaz Al-Khass, or Special Branch, and collected meticulous dossiers on friends and enemies alike. Saddam used these dossiers to carry out a political putsch in the mid-sixties, as well as the bloodless 1968 coup that brought his party to full control of Iraq. From 1968 until 2003, Baathists controlled every aspect of Iraqi life and generalized the surveillance techniques that Saddam had used so effectively in his rise to power.
The Baath government amassed millions of personal records and forced its citizens to spy on family and friends for Saddam’s intelligence agencies. Those agencies, staffed almost exclusively by Sunnis, were masters at collecting and using the most intimate details of the lives of individual Iraqis. Stasi-level minutiae about family structure, births, deaths, relations and the aspirations of everyone who lived under the regime were documented and filed. The regime then used all its information to compel compliance, the alternative to which was death. After the invasion, the Baathists held the key to the human terrain of Iraq. All of these Saddamist traditions have been carried on by his disciples in ISIS.
One of these is Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, usually known as Haji Bakr, a former spy for Saddam who became chief of military operations for ISIS.
From as early as 2004, al Qaeda in Iraq gradually sought to transfer control of the Iraqi jihad from foreign fighters like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri to local Iraqi commanders like Abu Umar al-Baghdadi. AQI became the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2006, just as many local captives were being released from U.S. military prisons such as Camp Bucca. One of them was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the future caliph of ISIS. As an Iraqi, he had been held not with the high-value al Qaeda terrorists, but with low-level FRL and Iraqi religious extremist insurgents. At Bucca, al-Baghdadi formed bonds and apparently conceived the model that would eventually become ISIS, a consolidated force of Iraqi Sunni FRLs, joined with al Qaeda’s foreign fighters, that would take back their traditional tribal lands and then form a caliphate. That’s where he connected with Haji Bakr.
Der Spiegel magazine recently obtained Haji Bakr’s handwritten notes and organizational diagrams for creating an ISIS spy agency based on Saddam’s own intelligence agencies. The notes, the magazine reported, confirmed what American intelligence agencies had assumed for well over a decade — that the ex-Baathists ran almost everything in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Since 2003 these ex-Baathists have been ruthlessly pulling the strings of the jihadists in Iraq. First they facilitated al Qaeda’s entry into the insurgency, then they built them hundreds of car bombs and provided intelligence on American operations.
In case you were wondering about the decision to disband the Iraqi army, even Paul Bremer, the viceroy at the time won’t take responsibility for that decision anymore.
So who did make the decision? It’s one of the enduring mysteries. The New York Times tried to unravel it a while back:
Fateful Choice on Iraq Army Bypassed Debate
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD — When President Bush convened a meeting of his National Security Council on May 22, 2003, his special envoy in Iraq made a statement that caught many of the participants by surprise. In a video presentation from Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III informed the president and his aides that he was about to issue an order formally dissolving Iraq’s Army.
The decree was issued the next day.
The broad outlines of the decision are now widely known, defended by proponents as necessary to ensure that Saddam Hussein’s influence did not outlive his ouster from power.
But with the fifth anniversary of the start of the war approaching, some participants have provided in interviews their first detailed, on-the-record accounts of a decision that is widely seen as one of the most momentous and contentious of the war, assailed by critics as all but ensuring that American forces would face a growing insurgency led by embittered Sunnis who led much of the army.
The account that emerges from those interviews, and from access to previously unpublished documents, makes clear that Mr. Bremer’s decree reversed an earlier plan — one that would have relied on the Iraqi military to help secure and rebuild the country, and had been approved at a White House meeting that Mr. Bush convened just 10 weeks earlier.
The interviews show that while Mr. Bush endorsed Mr. Bremer’s plan in the May 22 meeting, the decision was made without thorough consultations within government, and without the counsel of the secretary of state or the senior American commander in Iraq, said the commander, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan. The decree by Mr. Bremer, who is known as Jerry, prompted bitter infighting within the government and the military, with recriminations continuing to this day.
Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.
Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.
“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”
The author of this article goes through the possible list of decision makers and comes up with this theory by process of elimination:
Abstract.In May 2003 Paul Bremer issued CPA Orders to exclude from the new Iraq government members of the Baath Party (CPA Order 1) and to disband the Iraqi Army (CPA Order 2). These two orders severely undermined the capacity of the occupying forces to maintain security and continue the ordinary functioning of the Iraq government. The decisions reversed previous National Security Council judgments and were made over the objections of high ranking military and intelligence officers.
The article concludes that the most likely decision maker was the Vice President.
Would anyone be surprised to learn that Dick Cheney was instrumental in the creation of ISIS?