Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State have had two famous
leaders. First was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded the organization originally
known as Tawhid wal Jihad. He was known for his beheadings and bombing campaigns
against the international community and the Shiites, which helped spark the
civil war. The other was current IS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who announced the
establishment of the Caliphate after the fall of Mosul in June 2014. In between
those two was Abu Omar al-Baghdadi who had a much more obscure reputation. For
example, when he was first announced as the new head of Al Qaeda in Iraq there
was a debate about whether he was a real person or not, and then there were
stories that he was an actor who only acted as a figurehead. Since then more
information has come out to show that Omar al-Baghdadi had much more substance
and helped the group survive through the Anbar Awakening, the Surge, and the Sahwa.
Craig Whiteside and Haroro Ingram recently wrote an article about all three of
these personalities in “Don’t
Kill the Caliph; the Islamic State and the Pitfalls of Leadership
Decapitation." for War on the
Rocks. Here is an interview with Whiteside who is a professor at the Naval
War College Monterey and a student of the Islamic State movement. He can be found
on Twitter at @CraigAWhiteside
1. The founder of Al
Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006. He
was replaced by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi who was almost immediately denigrated by
the U.S. and Iraqi governments. What was said about him at first, and why
didn’t those stories seem believable to you?
There has really only been two schools of thought on the
impact of Abu Omar on the Islamic State movement. One is that he was a
propaganda ploy (not even a real person) to address complaints that the group
was led by foreigners, and was hastily and poorly selected. The other
acknowledges that he was real enough but treats him as rather unremarkable.
Certainly popular accounts today choose even a third path, and ignore this
critical period altogether.
My research on the political worldview of the movement from
2003-2013 put Abu Omar’s leadership in a different perspective for me, and I
was convinced by Nibras Kazimi’s early
work in identifying Abu Omar’s role as a proto-caliph in the early Islamic
State that the conventional wisdom could be mistaken.
The case that Abu Omar was a fraud revolves around one ISI
defector from 2007 and one recent alleged defector. The first, Abu
Sulayman, was an early ISI Sharia chief from Saudi Arabia who arrived in
2006-7 and lasted less than a year before being fired. His account has received
significant attention, but should be taken with some skepticism due to his late
arrival, short tenure, and ignominious exit. He never met Abu Omar and reported
confusion as to his actual position. The second account by a self-proclaimed
former ISI veteran who “returned” to AQ contains so many factual errors that it
has to be viewed as a possible fraud. One error includes placing Abu Bakr’s
internment in Bucca much longer and later that it actually was, which reflected
the early popular reports about when he was imprisoned at Camp Bucca (which was
for a large part of 2004). This author Abu
Ahmad claimed that Abu Bakr was imprisoned in 2006 for several years, when
in actuality he most likely served as the emir of Mosul in 2008-9 – the premier
position during a period when the ISI was anchored around the famous city in
order to survive the 2008-2011 period. While the detail in his account is
amazing, no one in IS after 2008 would have made this particular mistake.
I think it is amazing that popular accounts of who Abu Omar
and Abu Bakr were before they rose to power depict them respectively as either
a complete nobody or as someone mostly working on his PhD and end up being manipulated
into being emir. Much more convincing accounts and captured documents tell a
different story, which makes much more sense to me: both were movement veterans
(from 2004-5) that did key jobs in tough places, and did them well enough to
turn heads. This is how our military selects people for promotion to commander,
and we should consider that this practice might be a universal characteristic
of politico-military organizations that place a large emphasis on armed combat
and terror.
2. So what was Omar
al-Baghdadi’s background and how did he move up the ranks to become the emir of
Al Qaeda in Iraq?
Zarqawi was infamous even before he came to Iraq, but Abu
Omar was different. As the first Iraqi emir of the newly proclaimed Islamic
State of Iraq, he had a different security dynamic to worry about. In order to
protect his extended family in Haditha from retribution from pro-government elements,
he did what indigenous insurgents have done forever – relying on pseudonyms (even
multiple ones) to protect their identity. Abu Omar supposedly had three that were
documented during his time in TwJ/AQI/ISI, which made him a shadowy figure in
his own organization, for good reason. The U.S. saw it as something else
(deception maybe, or inauthenticity), but for him it was protecting his
identity – something a Zarqawi or Abu Hamza did not have to do (I got this idea
from a student at NPS who told me he interviewed everyone in Abu Omar’s family
in Haditha back in 2009). Eventually Abu Omar’s identity was outed in 2008, and
his name released not by the Americans but an Anbari
local police chief who figured it out. I think Abu Omar’s background is
illuminating to how AQI grew in Iraq. He was not a product of the infamous and
over attributed Faith Campaign – as if Saddam controlled every aspect of life
in Iraq - but from the more insidious underground Salafi movement that found a
receptive audience in certain Sunni areas of Iraq. The biography I found after years of
looking – posted on a jihadist site in 2012 by a writer sympathetic to the IS
movement – is interesting in its frankness, which is typical of this genre. It
paints Abu Omar as a religious ideologue with a hard edge and outspoken
opinions about the proper Salafi methodology, someone with managerial skills
that outshone any heroic deeds he performed during a fast rise in the AQI
organization. Of note, this account is one of the only ones I have seen on Abu
Omar – who was a secretive and careful man – and it is difficult to assess its
veracity without using classified sources. Our intent in writing the War on the
Rocks article was to encourage further research into this important subject.
According to this biography, he was recruited by foreign
fighters traveling the Iraqi Salafi networks - Abu Muhammad al Lubnani and Abu
Anas al Shami, two legendary Zarqawi lieutenants – in 2004 after he sheltered
Zarqawi on several occasions. After proving himself in Haditha and Baghdad in various
security and sharia roles, he was selected to be the emir of Diyala, whose capital
at the time was one of the jewels of the AQI franchise. From here he moved to
be the chief of staff of the organization, hand screening all selections for
senior positions, and he was a voting member of the Shura council. It was in
this position that the council voted him to be the emir of the newly proclaimed
Islamic State of Iraq in October 2006, over long time Zarqawi deputy Abu Hamza
al Muhajir (an Egyptian veteran of Al Qaeda).
It seems logical that the council picked an Iraqi with a
claim to Qureshi tribal affiliation for their first leader, especially at a
time where they were being criticized for declaring an Islamic State (an
unspoken mandate to rally to the black banner) and being dominated by
foreigners. The truth was that AQI had become very Iraqi at this point, with
some highly visible foreigners at the top. For it to take root deep in the
Iraqi social fabric, it had to be this way. The death of Zarqawi facilitated
this transition, which makes sense now but at the time, the U.S. either didn’t
want to believe it or was deliberately conducting a deception campaign to smear
the IS movement as foreign. One other interesting dynamic is that the shura
council was made up of equal representation from the different groups that
joined with AQI to make up the MSC in early 2006, and this meant that the
council was mostly Iraqi. Abu Omar states in his first speech that he was
humbled and surprised to be chosen, since he had never been one of the original
leaders of these separate groups that joined together – and certainly not the
senior member from the clearly dominant faction (AQI). Nonetheless, Abu Hamza -
Zarqawi’s long time deputy and the post-Zarqawi leader of the AQI “faction” of
MSC – quickly pledged allegiance to Abu Omar and from all accounts I have seen,
they had a close working relationship. They were killed together in 2010, but
not before building and sustaining the organization we know today.
3. You and Ingram
wrote that the transition from Zarqawi to Baghdadi marked a shift from a charismatic
leader to more of a managerial one. Can you explain what you meant?
My colleague Haroro Ingram has
done extensive research on charismatic leadership
in the larger Islamic militant movement, and we thought it provided a powerful
explanation of Abu Omar’s role in the organization based on the facts we were
able to assemble. Zarqawi was the visionary, the dreamer, and the person who
broke from the norms everyone told him he had to do to be successful.
Charismatic leaders inspire and transform organizations, often from scratch.
But at some point they outlive their usefulness. No organization can survive at
the turbocharged pace of the charismatic leader, and to progress must conduct
what Max Weber called routinization – the normalization of the organization. We
feel that the death of Zarqawi in June 2006 gave the Shura Council the
opportunity to replace the shooting star with someone who was more of a manager,
who paid attention to recruitment, budgets, institutional building, and mergers
with like-minded groups. Someone with a low ego who would respect the Shura
council’s demands and share power with AQI’s old guard foreign fighters.
Everything we have read about Abu Omar leads us to believe that the shura
council made a reasonable decision in picking an Iraqi from Anbar with the
correct pedigree, skills, and comportment to lead the Islamic State movement
through a difficult transition from a charismatic leader to one that Weber
calls a legal-rational leader.
4. Omar al-Baghdadi
was the leader of the group during what everyone now considers its nadir when
it was facing a revolt by its former allies within the tribes and insurgent
community as well as the growing counterinsurgency abilities of the U.S. and
Iraqi forces. How was he able to bring the organization through this period and
even begin to rebuild it?
The question points toward our own bias when we produce
reams and reels about a Zarqawi and now an Abu Bakr, when the real miracle was
keeping this organization alive during the crucible you described above. As
long time students of organizational leadership, my partner Haroro and I
gravitated toward this period for insights into what this tells us about IS
today and what we can expect once the caliphate is collapsed, which we are
confident it will be.
First, Abu Omar didn’t institute any drastic changes in the
organization that might have divided its foreign fighter and Iraqi base. He
continued Zarqawi’s basic tenets, which are not uncontroversial; but within
this organization, they are probably baked in. Secondly, he and his partner Abu
Hamza realized that they had to closely meld the ISI military and political
strategy to be successful. The Sawha had to be the first target or they would be
unable to attain the kind of access to their base that would allow them to
eventually challenge the Iraqi government for outright control of Sunni areas.
Their carrot and stick campaign, as I have written
about, is much more influential in pushing and forcing some Sunni tribes
back into their camp than generic stories about Maliki’s devious sectarianism.
All the IS written strategies that authors highlight that were instrumental in
their success were written during Abu Omar’s emirship and most likely
influenced by him. Thirdly, Abu Omar presided over the bureaucratization and
institutionalization of a very difficult organization – a clandestine insurgency
under pressure from the most capable Army in the world. Even in his own
personal life, he was able to balance security concerns with running an
efficient organization to achieve effects. Check out RAND’s recent publication
that uses captured documents to detail the immense bureaucracy that was the IS
movement in 2005-2010. It probably is the most amazing research I have seen yet
on the subject.
Finally, his legacy tells a much different story than our
current collective wisdom. For over a year after his death, every operational
summary from every province credited their assassinations, bombings, and
assaults to Abu Omar’s Harvest of the Good campaign. The security crisis brought
on by mass wave of ISI arrests in 2010 after Manaf
al Rawi’s capture pushed Abu Bakr deep underground as the new emir, and yet
the organization flourished and increased its operations significantly despite
the lack of visible leadership. This is often called a leader’s true legacy –
how it performs after the leader is gone. If you listen closely to IS videos
today, you can hear Abu Omar in the background more frequently than ever
before. This could be because it was his steadfastness that inspired them to
continue the fight in the dark days, a trait they might need here in the near
future. A measure of this respect: the first mosque that IS built after 2014’s
seizure of Mosul was named after Abu Omar, as well as several training camps
around the region.
5. Finally, do you
think Omar al-Baghdadi leadership style led to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s rise to
the head of the Islamic State?
Haroro and I wrote that the three leaders fit well into the
charismatic leadership framework, which reflects significant wisdom on behalf
of the shura council that has chosen these individuals and extended the life of
an organization that really should have died long ago. This is not to say that
they don’t have significant leadership shortcomings or a flawed ideology and
doctrine that makes it difficult to imagine they will ever be successful in the
future – their former sponsors in AQ are fairly sure of that. Certainly for the
benefit of humanity they cannot. That said, all three of the past and current
emirs of the movement have shared such a dogmatic embrace of this ideology that
it is hard to think that they not only have influenced each other but have
carefully groomed and selected people that think this way to continue to lead
it. I argue that is why ideology is a helpful and productive way to view IS.
Looking back at the Marxist ideology, the movements that adopted it as their
centering principles all adapted it over time to fit the environment. I don’t
think the same can be said for IS, which other than its accommodation of Sunni
tribes, has been rather ideologically rigid.
Consider one prospective successor of the three emirs:
Mohammad al Adnani. He is cut from the same cloth as the others; more of a
warrior but less of a religious figure than Abu Omar and Abu Bakr (although he
wowed Zarqawi early on with his memorization of the Koran as a very young man),
and probably the best speaker of the three. But all accounts of his
interactions since his long stay in Camp Bucca paint a picture of an arrogant
and emotional figure that is the anti-thesis of a Joulani from Nusra Front, and
an extremist who could even make the previous three look tame in comparison.
This is why we argued in “Don’t
Kill the Caliph” that the group is well positioned for its eventual demise,
and that it is important that their own actions be acknowledged as the primary
cause – not some Coalition airstrike that removes the so-called caliph. Abu Bakr took Abu Omar’s blueprint and
improved upon it, no doubt assisted by the large numbers of IS movement
veterans that joined after 2009 as Camp
Bucca let out its poison back into Iraqi society. But Abu Bakr’s disastrous
decisions after the highpoint of success in the fall of 2014 brought to bear
entirely too many simultaneous opponents that were shocked by IS’ brutal
massacres, sexual slavery, genocide,
and arrogance. While Abu Omar’s persistence and organizational skills helped IS
survive one near-death experience, I don’t believe it will survive its next
one. The group’s many adversaries will make sure of it this time around.
No comments:
Post a Comment