The corporate media went gaga about the "new" jihadi militia group ISIS a few months ago, largely because they had overrun the Sunni Triangle part of Iraq that had been the main battleground of the Bush/Cheney war.
And also because ISIS provided lots of gruesome video.
So ISIS became the new Islamic boogeyman, and we're back in Iraq bombing, for now.
Who are these guys?
The War Nerd knows, far more than anyone you'll read/view/hear in the corporate media.
Here'e the lede from his comprehensive post at Pando back in June:
As the Scriptures remind us, “Do not believe the hype.” The hype of the moment is ISIS, the Sunni militia that just drove the so-called Iraqi Army out of Mosul, Tikrit, and other Iraqi cities.
This is one of those dramatic military reverses that mean a lot less than meets the eye. The “Iraqi Army” routed by ISIS wasn’t really a national army, and ISIS isn’t really a dominant military force. It was able to occupy those cities because they were vacuums, abandoned by a weak, sectarian force. Moving into vacuums like this is what ISIS is good at. And that’s the only thing ISIS is good at.
More, below.
The War Nerd is very readable, as you all will see here, and his June analysis of ISIS -- as a small-but-ambitious sectarian (Sunni) miltia that can only hold ground in the Sunni areas of Iraq and neighboring Syria -- has turned out to be prescient.
ISIS now controls most of Anbar as well as a huge chunk of eastern and central Syria. It’s a de facto Sunni state, straddling the Syria/Iraq border between Kurdish and Shia territory.
And that’s as far as it will go. ISIS has done well to take back its natural constituency, the Sunni center of Iraq. It will push against the Shia to the south, but they’ll fight much better on their own turf. And if it has any sense, it won’t even try to push against the Persh Merga. I used to see the Pesh Merga every day, and they ain’t nobody to mess with.
The War Nerd's backstory on ISIS is fascinating, and like nothing I'd read/heard/seen anywhere else.
Act I:
It started with a small group of Sunni militants who agreed, around the turn of the Millenium, to overthrow the monarchy in Jordan. You may remember a shadowy Scarlet Pimpernel figure called “Al Zarqawi,” who was built up into the Mister Big of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq by US public-relations mouthpieces. He was called “Al Zarqawi” because he came from the town of Zarqa, a town in Jordan founded by Chechen refugees who gave the peaceful Arabs an infusion of Chechen ferocity.
Zarqawi’s group didn’t do very well in Jordan. Jordan’s Bedouin security guys don’t play around, as the PLO found out in what came to be known as Black September.
Act II:
By 2002, Zarqawi was in bad shape, on the run with a bullet in his leg. Things were looking bleak for Sunni Islamists all over the Middle East…until the Spring of 2003, when a couple of guys named Bush and Cheney gave them new life by invading Iraq, crushing Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Iraqi state, and pushing millions of Iraqi Sunni into armed insurgency.
Act III:
Zarqawi’s group, one of many forming and bursting in the Sunni Triangle, went through several name changes before it finally settled on the no-nonsense title of “The Islamic State of Iraq,” or “I.S.I.” in the Autumn of 2006. By then, Zarqawi was dead, vaporized in a U.S. air strike in June 2006.
At the time, American reporters crowed over his death, going for the old “Mister Big” theory of insurgency that never fits the facts. Insurgent groups go through leaders like Spinal Tap went through drummers, and often the cull makes them stronger, since every new generation selects for the most ruthless, cunning survivor in the group.
Act IV:
ISIS went through a lot of commanders before one stuck. He was a product of Islamic schools and US prison camps. He called himself Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, which means exactly nothing except that he’s claiming to be from Baghdad.
He got out of prison in 2009 and walked into a leadership vacuum created by an airstrike which killed his predecessor—nothing like airstrikes to make room at the top—and oversaw ISIS’s move away from pressure once again, out of the cities toward the deserts of Anbar Province where Sunni sheikhs maintained strong clan networks. It wasn’t much, but it was a safe base, and that’s something any mixed militia/guerrilla force requires.
Act V:
ISIS got its second great break when The Syrian Civil War exploded in 2012. They looked west, across the Anbar deserts, and saw a huge organizational opportunity opening up in Syria. Assad’s troops had abandoned most of Eastern Syria to focus on defending the Alawite heartland along the coast. That vacuum created an opportunity for lots of people: The Syrian Kurds, who occupied a tier along the Turkish border in the northeast; dozens of local mafia/resistance groups, who mobilized to profit from the wide-open borders; and the nucleus of ISIS, who saw a chance to set up a little emirate in this new no-man’s-land in the wastelands of eastern Syria, along the borders with Anbar.
Act VI:
At the beginning of 2014, ISIS, facing a tough fight from angry jihadi rivals in Syria, simply headed downstream, along the Euphrates, back to the area of weakness it had smelled in Iraq. Think of the Euphrates as a see-saw; when pressure on the western end pushed it up, ISIS just slid down to the other end of the plank, the city of Fallujah. ISIS took control of Fallujah at the beginning of the year 2014.
That wasn’t such a shock. Fallujah has always been a combative Sunni city, as the US military discovered a couple of times during the US occupation. Many irregular forces grab cities for short periods as a show of strength, then retreat when the regular army moves in. But that didn’t happen in Fallujah, and that was very bad news for Maliki and the Shia coalition that rules Iraq (more or less). Their expensive, American-trained army was unable to take back Fallujah, which is still in ISIS’s hands.
That was showing weakness on a Vegas-size billboard, and other Sunni strongholds got the message very quickly, especially Mosul, where Saddam’s officer corps has been simmering since it was dismissed with prejudice by the US occupiers. Mosul fell to ISIS in the second week of June 2014.
See what I mean about readable -- "shadowy Scarlet Pimpernel figure," "nothing like airstrikes to make room at the top," "the old 'Mister Big' theory of insurgency that never fits the facts," "showing weakness on a Vegas-size billboard," etc.
The guy can write.
His explication of how jihadi groups work, and compete with each other, is also quite readable:
Syria should have been ISIS’s greatest moment, but things didn’t work out for it there. Not because it was “extreme,” but because it tried too hard to dominate the market against savvy local competition. Syria was a wide-open market for jihadi organizers, free to operate openly over most of the country after decades of effective repression. Money was pouring in from fat armchair jihadis in Saudi, Kuwait, and the Emirates—enough to pay jihadis a first-world salary of $1,500/mo.
If you had a good line of patter and a few Quranic passages memorized, you could score some investment money. And military entrepreneurs poured in to take advantage of the opportunity; so many that by 2013, there were 1,200 different jihadi groups operating in Syria.
These baby militias popped up, prospered for a while, then vanished like Ethiopian restaurants.
His brief description of the Free Syrian Army, beloved by John McCain, is readable too:
Who owned the resistance? Of course, there were front groups like the “Free Syrian Army” (pause for laughter), set up to convince the West to give up some serious weaponry by playing at being “moderate.” But how many divisions did the FSA ever have? None, really—a few officers who’d defected from Assad’s army, but very few fighters willing to die for the cause.
ISIS has, for now, ratified that Iraq is essentially divided into three sectarian parts -- Kurdish north, Sunni central north of Baghdad, Shia the rest.
Maybe we could again bribe the Sunnis to go along with the idea of a united Iraq along lines drawn by European imperialists.
But the War Nerd would probably warn that that's another SW Asia fool's errand by an imperial power that has no clue.