Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (13 page)

SOURCES

4
“jayvee [junior varsity] team”: President Obama’s “jayvee” remark has of course been subject to political spin from both directions, but its original intent is strikingly clear. See David Remnick, “Going the Distance,”
The New Yorker
, 27 January 2014, and the non-partisan analysis of the remark in Glenn Kessler, “Spinning Obama’s Reference to ISIS as a ‘JV’ Team”,
The
Washington Post,
3 September 2014.

4
“you are the first class”: Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony, 28 May 2014.

5
“Drone” as used here refers to remotely-piloted aircraft like the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper, controlled by ground stations that may be on the other side of the planet, and carrying missiles and surveillance equipment to target terrorists. These are not true “drones” in that they’re not fully autonomous – I use the term simply because it’s in widespread usage and is well understood by non-specialist readers.

7
“Dozens of local movements”: David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” 2004. <
www.academia.edu/7026837/Countering_global_insurgency
>.

8
“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”: President Bush made this statement, or a variation of it, many times during his first term. One of the earliest and most public was during his Address to the Nation on 20 September 2001, less than two weeks after 9/11. See “President Bush Addresses the Nation,”
The Washington Post
, 20 September 2001.

8
“such a strategy”: Kilcullen, 2004.

10
“General Eric Shinseki”: Matthew Engel, “Scorned General’s Tactics Proved Right: Profile of the army chief sidelined by Rumsfeld,”
The Guardian
, 29 March 2003.

10
“Periodically, in the early days”: Discussion with officer serving in Ramadi, Anbar province, May–October 2003.

10
“Many had expected”: Interview with former deputy chief of CIA Station Baghdad, Green Zone, April 2007.

10
“Rumsfeld denied reality”: Joel Roberts, “Top General: Insurgency not fading,”
CBS News
online, CBS/AP, 23 June 2005.

12
“1059 in the first weeks of 2006 alone”: For Iraqi civilian casualties, I rely in this essay on a combination of data produced by Iraq Body Count (IBC) and unclassified reports from the US Department of Defense. This figure is from IBC – see <
www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2006/
>. Note: I have made no use of any data derived from WikiLeaks’ “Iraq War Logs,” as that material remains classified. If anything, including the WikiLeaks data would raise rather than lower this estimate.

12
“160,000 US troops in the country”: The precise number, as of 28 November 2005, was 157,982 US troops, and there were another 23,000 troops in Iraq, from a total of twenty-seven allied and coalition countries, supporting the effort. See Linwood B. Carter,
Iraq: Summary of U.S. Forces
, CRS Report for Congress, Washington DC, updated 28 November 2005
,
p. 1.

14
“accidental guerrillas”: For a detailed description of this construct, see David Kilcullen,
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.

14
“CIA report”: Central Intelligence Agency,
Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction
, National Intelligence Estimate 2002-16HC, October 2002, unredacted version approved for public release 9 December 2014, p. 68.

15
“as far as we know”: Mustafa Hamid, a leading militant who fought in Afghanistan, visited Zarqawi near Herat, and (like him) escaped to Iran after 2001, told Australian counterterrorism expert Leah Farrell that “from the beginning, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was very independent . . . he was not under the control of al-Qaeda at all, but he had a good friendly relationship with them.” See Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrell,
The Arabs at War in Afghanistan
, Hurst & Co., London, 2015, p. 257.

15
“Zarqawi and his cells set out”: Author’s field notes, drawn from interviews with Iraqi colleagues at the Iraqi army counterinsurgency school, Taji, on 21 and 26 June 2007.

15
“turned America’s plan upside down”: CNN, “Al-Zawahiri: U.S. faltering in Afghanistan – CIA analysing al Qaeda videotape that appeared on Al-Jazeera,” CNN online, 9 November 2004.

16
“Iraq, Iraq and Iraq”: Robert M. Gates,
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War
, Knopf, New York, 2014, p. 23

17
“al-Douri . . . was now running a resistance network”: Discussion with CIA operations officer RM, Baghdad, March 2007.

18
“hundreds of civilians were being killed each week”: Civilian deaths in Iraq, the majority inflicted by sectarian killings, averaged 661 per week for the last quarter of 2006 – more than 50 per cent of these happening inside Baghdad or the belts. See Iraq Body Count, <
www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2006/
>.

18
“some Shi’a areas had constant electricity”: Author’s personal observation, Baghdad, March 2006.

19
“fighters from an AQI cell”: This example is drawn from two incidents, one described to me by a cavalry officer operating in Tal Afar in 2005–06, and one that I observed myself in northwest Baghdad in April 2007.

20
“Once they’d created a base”: This description is drawn from an interview with my Iraqi interpreter in Baghdad in May 2007, based on his eyewitness account of what happened to his twelve-year-old younger brother and several boys from his neighbourhood in 2005–06.

20
For a profile of Abu Deraa and a link to the famous YouTube video, see Lydia Khalil, “The Shiite Zarqawi: A Profile of Abu Deraa,”
Terrorism Monitor
, vol. 4, no. 22, 16 November 2006.

20
“kidnapping gangs auctioning off terrified children”: Author’s personal observation and field notes, Baghdad, March 2007 – based on accounts from patrol members from a US airborne battalion operating in northern Baghdad, 2006.

20
“an infantry unit I worked with”: Author’s field notes from geothermal power plant, AO Commando, near Mahmudiyah, June 2007.

21
“The first stage”: English translation of a letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, available online from the Combating Terrorism Center, 9 July 2005, p. 3.

22
“Indeed, questions will circulate”: Ayman al-Zawahiri 2005, pp. 8–9.

23
“the caliphate was a vague, utopian ideal”: For this insight, I’m indebted to Professor Mary Habeck of Johns Hopkins University – see Mary R. Habeck,
Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror
, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007.

26
“later codified as”: See <
http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=3177
> for an unclassified extract from the
Multi-National Force Iraq Counterinsurgency Guideline
, issued in early June 2007.

28
“several tribal leaders had approached special forces in Anbar”: For a detailed account of these events, see SGT Christopher Alexander, CPT Charles Kyle and MAJ William S. McCallister,
The Iraqi Insurgent Movement
, 14 November 2003, <
www.comw.org/warreport/fulltext/03alexander.pdf
>.

29
“waterfall slide”: For a copy of this slide and related data, see “Overall Weekly Attack Trends,”
OIF – Iraq Significant Activities (SIGACTs)
,
GlobalSecurity.org
, <
www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_sigacts.htm
>.

32
“extraordinary crisis”: Martin Fletcher, “Al-Qaeda leaders admit: ‘We are in crisis. There is panic and fear’,”
The Times
, London, 11 February 2008.

32
“According to Iraq Body Count”: Civilian casualty figures, as well as incident numbers, are drawn from the Iraq Body Count database.

32
“US troops killed per month”: Data come from the
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count
at <
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/ByMonth.aspx
> (for US killed in Iraq, all causes) and from <
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/USCasualtiesByState.aspx
> (for US wounded).

33
“most Iraqi families had four to five kids”: World Health Organization and Iraq Ministry of Health,
Iraq Family Health Survey 2006/2007
, Baghdad, Ministry of Health, 2008, p. 19.

33
“led some . . . to call the Surge a victory”: For example,
Newsweek
’s cover story on 3 March 2010 was “Victory at Last: The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq” by Babak Dehghanpiseh, while the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, issued a DVD entitled
The Surge: The Untold Story
, which described the surge as “one of the most successful military operations in a generation of war fighting.” See <
www.understandingwar.org/press-media/event/premier-event-surge-untold-story-never-seen-interviews
>.

33
“During a meeting”: Reported to the author by an American military officer who was in the meeting, June 2007, Baghdad.

34
“the decisive events of the Iraq War”: Thomas E. Ricks,
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq
, Penguin, 2009.

35
“the Obama administration ramped up drone strikes”: Jack Serle, “Almost 2,500 Now Killed by Covert US Drone Strikes Since Obama Inauguration Six Years Ago,”
Common Dreams
, online, 2 February 2015.

35
“putting domestic issues…ahead of foreign policy”: For this insight, I’m indebted to Dr Janine Davidson of the Council on Foreign Relations.

36
“Maliki created structures”: Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor,
The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq
,
from George W. Bush to Barack Obama
, Vintage Books, 2013, pp. 360–1.

36
For a detailed account of growing authoritarian behaviour under Maliki, including the “stacking” of command positions with political and sectarian loyalists, see Marisa Sullivan,
Maliki’s Authoritarian Regime
, Institute for the Study of War, Middle East Security Report No. 10, April 2013.

36
“He cut funding to the Sons of Iraq”: Ted Carpenter, “A New Dictator? Nouri al-Maliki is exhibiting worrying authoritarian tendencies,”
The National Interest
, 19 January 2010.

36
“the national unity government”: Sullivan, 2013, p. 9.

38
“Just after 1 a.m.”: For the first detailed account of the raid, including the rough timeline, see Nicholas Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden: What happened that night in Abbottabad,”
The New Yorker
, 8 August 2011.

38
“lost no time taking credit”: See, for example, “Veterans group to Obama: ‘Heroes Don’t Spike the Football,”
The Daily Caller,
5 March 2012, <
http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/03/veterans-group-to-obama-heroes-don’t-spike-the-football-video/
>.

38
“Alec Station . . . was closed”: Mark Mazzetti, “C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of Bin Laden,”
The New York Times
, 4 July 2006.

39
“By 2011 the main threat came from AQ in the Arabian Peninsula”: U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” <
www.nctc.gov/site/groups/aqap.html
>.

39
For the Fort Hood shooting, see Josh Rubin and Matt Smith, “‘I am the shooter,’ Nidal Hasan tells Fort Hood court-martial,” CNN News, 6 August 2013.

41
“Bin Laden’s death catapulted AQ into crisis”: John Hudson, “Succession Battle Threatens to Split Al Qaeda,”
The Atlantic
, 18 May 2011.

41
“This meant AQ was absent”: Will McCants, “How Zawahiri Lost Al Qaeda”, 19 November 2013, <
www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/11/19-how-zawahri-lost-al-qaeda-mccantsw
>.

42
“From this mix something new was born”: For a more detailed exposition of this history, see Abdel Bari Atwan
, The Secret History of Al Qa’eda
, updated edition, University of California Press, Oakland, 2008.

43
“We have to cut [off] the head of the snake”: Osama bin Laden, quoted in Mark Fineman and Stephen Braun, “Life Inside Al Qaeda: A Destructive Devotion,”
Los Angeles Times
, 24 September 2001.

43
“a hideous compliment”: Niall Ferguson,
Civilization: The West and the Rest
, Penguin, New York, 2011, preface.

44
“the status quo is unsustainable” and “must begin now”: Barack Obama, “Obama says Egypt’s transition ‘must begin now’”, CNN News, 2 February 2011.