ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (3 page)

At their trial, al-Zarqawi and al-Maqdisi decided to transform the dock into a pulpit, much as al-Zawahiri had in Egypt. They denounced the court, the state, and the monarchy for violating the laws of God and Islam. According to Judge Hafez Amin, Bayt al-Imam “submitted a letter of accusation in which they claimed that we were acting against the teachings of the Holy Koran.” Amin was further instructed to pass on a message to King Hussein himself, accusing him of sacrilege. Al-Zarqawi was still junior to al-Maqdisi and was dwarfed by the cleric’s easy way with turning due process into propaganda. Both were sentenced in 1994 to fifteen years in prison and transferred to a desert-based maximum-security prison called Swaqa.

“PRISON WAS HIS UNIVERSITY”

Time in prison made al-Zarqawi more focused, brutal, and decisive. As a member of the Bani Hassan, he occupied a station above other inmates, even al-Maqdisi, who was nonetheless ennobled by his comradeship with al-Zarqawi. In Jordan, as elsewhere, the gemeinschaft of a jailhouse only emphasized the privileges and perks enjoyed by outlaws beyond their concrete boxes. Al-Zarqawi leveraged his influence with malleable or crooked guards to make his faction, made up of fellow Bayt al-Imam convicts, thrive. He got his underlings out of wearing standard-issue uniforms and morning roll call in the prison yard. “He could order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes,” a prison doctor recalled.

By means of coercion or persuasion, al-Zarqawi sought to singularize his interpretation of Islamist ideology, with himself in the role of supreme jurisprudent. He beat up those he didn’t like, such as a contributor to the Swaqa magazine who had turned out articles critical of him. Another inmate, Abu Doma, recalled that al-Zarqawi had once caught him reading
Crime and Punishment
,
a “book by a heathen.” Al-Zarqawi followed up to ensure Abu Doma abandoned his
interest in profane Russian literature, writing him a hectoring letter in which he spelled Dostoyevsky’s name “Doseefski.” (“The note was full of bad Arabic, like a child wrote it,” Doma recounted.) Unable to develop arguments, al-Zarqawi instead developed his body, using his bed frame and olive oil cans filled with rocks for weights. He didn’t always get his way with the guards, however. When he stood up to them, he was sometimes beaten, further impressing those who looked up to him as a leader of men. At one point, he was thrown into solitary confinement for eight and a half months.

It was in prison that al-Zarqawi also eclipsed al-Maqdisi and assumed the title of emir, a swapping of honorifics that the latter later insisted he bestowed upon the former. The mentor-scholar helped the protégé-commander cultivate ideology as well as brawn; both men composed fatwas,
or religious edicts, that then got uploaded to the Internet. A few of these even caught the attention of bin Laden, who had followed the trial of the two Jordanians with great interest from Pakistan. According to “Richard,” a former top-ranking counterterrorism official at the Pentagon who asked to be quoted under an alias, al-Zarqawi’s experience in prison was akin to Boston organized crime boss Whitey Bulger’s: “We sent him to the Harvard of American penitentiaries. He was a wily criminal who had a little IQ and put together some good streams of income. He comes out of the pen with great street cred that helped him form his own gang, which ran Boston for four or five years. Same with al-Zarqawi. Prison was his university.” Much the same would be said of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi twenty years later, as fellow ISIS inmates recounted his similar leadership qualities and maneuverability with the guards at Camp Bucca, the US-run detention facility in southern Iraq.

Ultimately al-Zarqawi served only a fraction of his sentence, owing to a dynastic succession in the government when Jordan’s King Hussein died and was succeeded by his son Abdullah II, a Western-educated reformist who instituted a policy of reconciliation
with the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition bloc in Jordanian parliament. In March 1999, the new king declared a general amnesty for around three thousand prisoners, excepting the worst offenders such as murderers, rapists, and traitors. Many Islamists who hadn’t actually committed terrorism against the crown were freed, al-Zarqawi among them.

MEETING BIN LADEN

Al-Zarqawi left Jordan in the summer of 1999, headed once more for Pakistan to pick up where he left off several years before. Al-Zarqawi was arrested briefly in Peshawar and spent eight days in detention, evidently because his visa had expired. Told that he would only receive his passport back if he used it to return to Jordan immediately, he instead smuggled himself across the border to Afghanistan, winding up in a jihadist “guest house” in a village west of Kabul in an area then under the sway of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Al-Zarqawi’s first meeting with Osama bin Laden took place in the Taliban’s de facto capital of Kandahar. It went quite badly. Bin Laden suspected him and the cabal of Jordanians he had arrived with of being infiltrated by the GID. Also, the ex-con’s many tattoos, which al-Zarqawi had amassed in his less pious days and then tried and failed to erase with hydrochloric acid in prison, also disturbed the puritanical Saudi. More than anything, however, it was al-Zarqawi’s arrogance, his “rigid views,” that offended bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri was present at the meeting and agreed that the Jordanian was not a prime candidate for membership in al-Qaeda.

ENEMIES, NEAR AND FAR

In 1996 bin Laden issued a fatwa,
“Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites,” the
two sites being Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia, where US and coalition forces were still stationed after the First Gulf War. The declaration was in a sense a fusion of Azzam and al-Zawahiri’s exegesis for holy warfare. As with Afghanistan, al-Qaeda claimed to be fighting another infidel occupier of Muslim land, only this time, the “occupier” was there at the invitation and pleasure of a Muslim government, bin Laden’s erstwhile collaborator against the Russians.

In the early 1990s al-Qaeda had targeted American soldiers throughout the Middle East and Africa, from Yemen to Saudi Arabia to Kenya and Tanzania, putting the organization firmly in the “far enemy” camp of jihad, albeit with the added dispensation for killing any Muslims who collaborated with the democratic superpower. So in wanting to bring terrorism back to Jordan, for use against
exclusively
Muslim targets, al-Zarqawi was still firmly in the “near enemy” camp. In other words, he was exactly where the elder al-Zawahiri had been a decade earlier, a divergence as much generational as it was ideological. Al-Zarqawi also had a much more promiscuous definition of
kuffar
(“unbelievers”), which he took to include all the Shia and any fellow Sunnis who did not abide by a strict Salafist covenant. Bin Laden had never drawn a bull’s-eye on these categories before, no doubt for filial reasons: his own mother was a Syrian Alawite, or a member of the offshoot of the Shia sect.

From such inauspicious beginnings, then, a marriage of convenience was forged between the two jihadists. Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s security chief, seems to have been the reason, owing to one of Islamic terrorism’s greatest tools: Rolodex pragmatism. Al-Zarqawi by then had extensive contacts in the Levant, which al-Adel convinced bin Laden would be useful to al-Qaeda. One of these contacts was Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who is today the official spokesman for ISIS.

TAWHID WAL-JIHAD

By 2000 al-Zarqawi was put in charge of a training camp in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, situated on the border with Iran. The camp was built with al-Qaeda start-up money, according to former CIA analyst Nada Bakos, who estimates that bin Laden granted al-Zarqawi $200,000 in the form of a “loan,” a pittance compared to what al-Qaeda was financially capable of disbursing. “All you needed was a patch of land, a couple of chin-up bars, and guys running around with AK-47s,” Richard, the ex-Pentagon official said. “We’re not talking about high-end training or even Marine Corps basic training. The physical activity at Herat was to determine who had the stomach for the fight.”

Al-Zarqawi fielded mainly Palestinian and Jordanian recruits for what he called Jund-al-Sham (Soldiers of the Levant), although the banner above the entrance to the camp carried the slogan that would later become the name of his terrorist cell in Iraq: “Tawhid wal-Jihad” (“Monotheism and Jihad”). As the name implied, the Soldiers of the Levant were being groomed for future terrorist operations in Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and other Arab countries, with the ultimate goal being regime change. Some of the camp’s graduates did indeed partake in “spectaculars,” including the 2002 assassination of Laurence Foley, an officer for the US Agency for International Development in Amman; and another well-publicized plot to set off chemical bombs in the Jordanian capital in 2004, targeting the prime minister’s office, the GID headquarters, and the US embassy. The Jordanian authorities claimed that had this attack been successful, it might have killed as many as eighty thousand people; al-Zarqawi accepted responsibility for the abortive attacks but denied that they featured any chemical weapons.

Jund al-Sham grew exponentially, deeply impressing al-Adel, who visited Herat monthly to report back to bin Laden on the
grantee’s progress. Bin Laden’s appraisal of al-Zarqawi might have changed slightly during that period. Repeatedly between 2000 and 2001, the al-Qaeda leader had asked al-Zarqawi to return to Kandahar and make
bayat
—or pledge allegiance—which was the sine qua non for full al-Qaeda enlistment. Repeatedly al-Zarqawi refused. “I never heard him praise anyone apart from the Prophet, this was Abu Mos’ab’s character, he never followed anyone, he only ever went out to get what he felt was just to do,” a former associate recollected. Whether owing to his arrogance or his difference of opinion with his benefactor, al-Zarqawi retained an arm’s-length and opportunistic relationship with al-Qaeda until 2004.

ANSAR AL-ISLAM

One of al-Zarqawi’s lieutenants at Herat was a fellow Jordanian, Abu Abdel Rahman al-Shami, who was tasked with expanding his network into northern Iraq via Iran in order to create a Taliban-style fief in the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, which was then protected from Saddam’s army and air force by an internationally enforced no-fly zone. The jihadist group that al-Shami formed was known as Jund al-Islam, and it occupied a five-hundred-square-kilometer area in the mountainous north of the region, lording over some two hundred thousand people, who were suddenly barred from alcohol, music, and satellite television.

After the September 11 attacks and the start of the US invasion of Afghanistan, Jund al-Islam merged with other terrorist cells to become Ansar al-Islam. The targets of this conglomerate were two: the Baathist regime in Baghdad and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani, who would become president of a post-Saddam Iraq.

On February 3, 2003, just weeks before the Iraq War began, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations and
claimed that Ansar al-Islam’s perch in northern Iraq, which had been detailed by Kurdish intelligence, was proof of al-Qaeda’s ties to Saddam’s regime. Al-Zarqawi’s network, Powell insisted, was manufacturing ricin and chemical weapons in its five-hundred-square-kilometer district, while al-Zarqawi, whom the top diplomat wrongly referred to as Palestinian, had spent months receiving medical treatment in Baghdad, under state auspices. He had allegedly needed a leg amputated and replaced by a prosthetic after sustaining a major injury in an aerial assault in Afghanistan.

Many of the minor and major details of Powell’s speech were later debunked after US forces invaded Iraq and recovered scores of Iraqi intelligence files and interrogated plenty of former Iraqi intelligence officers, although there were those who worked in the Bush administration who never bought Powell’s argument. “We first knew of Zarqawi in ’98 or ’99 and we knew what he was about,” Richard told us. “He was going to be a very brutal guy when he was flushed out of Afghanistan, but we didn’t know he was going to head to Iraq. We assumed he was going to go back to Jordan. As for his ‘hosting’ in Iraq, I don’t believe the whole Baghdad hospital story the way the administration sold it—that seems to fall in the ‘Dick Cheney imagination’ category.”

Although he had dispatched al-Shami and other Herat trainees into Kurdistan, al-Zarqawi’s relationship with Ansar al-Islam was more informal than the United States made out. In fact, it was based on exactly the kind of Rolodex pragmatism that led to al-Zarqawi’s own association with bin Laden. “Jihadists gain more from friendships and acquaintanceships than they do from being on a list together that says they’re part of the same terrorist cell,” Richard said. “Look at ISIS today or look at all the groups in Syria, how fungible they are. Ansar al-Islam gave Zarqawi refuge in [Iraq] Kurdistan because they knew him and they liked him. Remember, he was always good at cutting deals with various criminal and tribal entities.”

When the United States and NATO went to war in Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi’s camp in Herat was besieged by the Western-backed Northern Alliance, and al-Zarqawi fled to Kandahar, where he did sustain a mild injury from a coalition air strike. But he didn’t mangle a leg; he only broke a few ribs, according to Iyad Tobaissi, one of his former trainees. Al-Zarqawi and his convoy of around three hundred militants then departed the country for Iran, where they stayed for a week in the city of Zahedan before migrating to Tehran under the auspices of an old friend: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, yet another useful contact al-Zarqawi had made on his first trip to the North-West Frontier.

NUR AL-DIN AND IRAQ

According to a member of al-Zarqawi’s entourage, “Abu Mos’ab saw in Iraq a new arena for his jihad, a wide space; he was expecting to confront the Americans there once the war in Afghanistan was over, and God Almighty gave him the strength to become the new jihadist leader in Iraq. . . .He had been planning for this for a long time.” Saif al-Adel, the al-Qaeda security chief who had lobbied to keep al-Zarqawi closely tethered to the organization, later claimed the Jordanian’s decision to move to Iraq was actually rooted in the antique glories of Islamic history: “I think that what [al-Zarqawi] read about Nur al-Din and the launching of his campaign from Mosul in Iraq played a large role in influencing [him] to move to Iraq following the fall of the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan.” He was, it seems, inspired by the story of the twelfth-century ruler Nur al-Din Mahmud Zangi, who ruled over both Aleppo and Mosul and was celebrated as a hero of the Second Crusade. He destroyed Frankish forces in southern Turkey and defeated the Christian prince Raymond of Poitiers in Antioch. Later, Nur al-Din unified Syria by marrying the daughter of the
atabeg
of Damascus.
His vassal, the Kurdish military commander Saladin, a man whom many contemporary jihadists still channel, would become the overlord of Mosul. Before going off to join the Second Crusade, Saladin preached from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri. The location for al-Baghdadi’s sermon on June 28, 2014, was thus carefully chosen. He was not only paying homage to ISIS’s founding father, al-Zarqawi, but also implicitly heralding the reunification of Aleppo and Mosul under the black banner of the restored Islamic caliphate.