By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 17 March 2021

Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, the implied caliph of the Islamic State movement between 2006 and 2010, gave his sixteenth speech on 17 March 2009. The title of the speech was, “Harvest of the Good (The Gathering Will Be Defeated, and They Will Turn Their Backs and Flee)”.[1]

In this speech, Abu Umar, whose real name was Hamid al-Zawi, announced the termination of the “Dignity Plan” (Khutta al-Karama) , which had been declared in his second speech on 3 February 2007. The Dignity operation was interpreted by some as a “communication strategy designed to trump the recently announced U.S. surge” that “[e]ssentially … consisted of nothing more than attributing ongoing attacks to a coordinated strategic program with a high-profile title”. Be that as it may, by March 2009—approaching the sixth anniversary of the invasion that felled Saddam Husayn—the Islamic State of Iraq had been through the nadir of 2008 and was beginning to stabilise.[2] As Abu Umar puts it in this speech, the crest of the anti-IS “wave has broken”.

The speech is framed as a response to the then-new U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement a few weeks before that a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops would be undertaken. For Abu Umar, this was an “implicit admission of defeat”. Abu Umar evidently regarded Obama as contemptible, and it does not seem to have been wholly policy-related. The whole speech—brief as it was—is suffused with racial animus.

Obama’s clear desire to abandon Iraq is seen by Abu Umar as an opportunity, hence the ending of the Karama Plan and the declaration of the onset of the Harvest of the Good campaign to advance the jihad in the “next phase”. It was under the guidance of Harvest of the Good that the IS movement began its recovery after the Surge-and-Sahwa later in 2009, reinfiltrating zones it had been purged from and escalating its attacks on Iraqi security forces and the Awakening militias, and the Harvest of the Good campaign provided the framework for IS to move decisively into an expansionary phase in the year after Abu Umar was killed in April 2010.[3]

The speech’s sectarian paradigm—presenting IS as protecting Sunnis from Shi’is—is standard fare. Where perhaps there is more intrigue is right at the end, where Abu Umar offers forgiveness to Sunni Arabs, regardless of what they have done against the Islamic State so far, if they will just come back to jihadism. It is just a hint of the strategy Abu Umar was evolving.[4]

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Harvest of the Good (The Gathering Will Be Defeated, and They Will Turn Their Backs and Flee)

All praise is due to Allah. We praise Him and seek His help. Whomsoever Allah guides, none can misguide, and whomsoever He misguides, none can guide. I bear witness that there is no deity worthy of worship but Allah alone, without partner, and I bear witness that Muhammad is His slave and messenger.

To proceed:

Allah the Exalted has said: “The gathering [or assembly or multitude or host: jam’u] will be defeated, and they will turn their backs and flee” [Qur’an 54:45].

The ruler of Washington has announced a plan for a gradual withdrawal from our lands, and upon this announcement we have several observations:

First Observation:

After the American people themselves admitted the failure of their army in Iraq and the severity of their military and economic losses, they voted—in a strange and unprecedented act—for a black man, and they accepted that the house slave would become the master of the [White] House, after he promised them he would return their missing sons and wealth and fulfil their longed-for dreams. And now, here is the new master himself admitting failure and acknowledging defeat—even if only implicitly—while flattering the emotions of his former masters and new slaves with talk of “withdrawal” and an “honourable return” for “the greatest army in history,” as he called it.

Second Observation:

What the ruler of the occupying state has announced is nothing more than a cunning method of colonialism dressed in new clothes, hoping that the simple-minded and gullible will accept the occupation of our land and the humiliation of our dignity for three more years under the pretext of a phased withdrawal. And once those years are over, the lying fox will not fail to devise another trick for another three, and so on without end—guaranteeing the criminal a prolonged stay with minimal loss [in lives] and reduced material, military, and moral costs—especially since there are no guarantees with promises made by the Crusading occupier.

Third Observation:

He [Obama] continues the series of lies begun by his criminal predecessor, claiming that his army has achieved success beyond expectations, and that it remained this long—and will continue—to protect the security of the Iraqis! I say to this man: To whom are you speaking, O new criminal? What security and what success are you talking about? There is no house in Iraq without a deep wound carved into its heart from the loss of a loved one, the imprisonment of a friend, or the displacement of a relative. Four million Iraqis have left their homes. Hundreds of thousands are dead. Tens of thousands are imprisoned. And worse than all of that is the violation of our women’s honour, done with utter vileness in full view of the entire world. Is this [your] “success”? Is that [your] “security”?

Fourth Observation:

The great liar spoke of the heroism of his army in the Land of the Two Rivers [Mesopotamia], and one of his soldiers, named “Jordan”, told the story of his body being torn to pieces after, so he claims, he opened fire on a lion from Kataib Fursan al-Shuhada [the Knights of the Martyrdom Battalions], when that lion sought to storm his outpost, thereby protecting fifty others like him.

And I say to you, O “man”: Do you know what is [truly] astonishing? It is the lion who mounted the vehicle of death and sped forth, weaving through the crowd, maneuvering like a knight, singing the bridegrooms’ song—unmoved by enemy bullets, undeterred by the fortifications of the occupier. He came alone to strike a fortified bastion housing hundreds of his enemy’s soldiers. In a single moment, he turned their security into terror, their calm into panic, leaving a wound in the body of the fleeing soldier and a tear in the eye [of the survivors], saying through his ordeal: “Let the eyes of cowards never sleep, and victory belongs to Islam, O vile ones!”

If you built a bridge on earth named “Jordan,” then know that God has built for the martyr a palace in the sky—its brick of silver and gold, in the gardens of eternity [paradise]—where he [enjoys] delights, but your dog burns in the fires of Hell. History will record—if history itself survives—that Fursan al-Shuhada laid the foundation of honour and raised high the banner of Islam. They did not accept humiliation as a path, nor did they wail like women. Their memory and names remain carved in our hearts. The people of earth praise them, the people of Heaven make dua [pray] for them, and before Allah the enemies will be gathered [at the End of Days].

The Fifth and Most Important Observation:

This concerns his [Obama’s] statement that their continued presence was for the sake of establishing a sovereign state, and that they will remain to support the Iraqi government and will work to develop and strengthen its forces before their departure.

First: What government and what sovereignty are you talking about? O ruler of the Cross-worshipping state and ally of the Jews, our wounds are still bleeding. The butcher of Sunni children, Baqir Solagh,[5] is still at the heart of this government. At its head is a criminal from the Da’wa Party, which is Rafidi [derog. Shi’i] in creed and Magian [Zoroastrian, i.e., Iranian] in hatred. The two wings [of the government] are [composed of] the Badr Corps, with all its institutions and criminal bodies, and the Kurdish agents with their Asayish butchers. These are the ones whose state you wish to strengthen and whose foundation you want to solidify. The local elections in Baghdad were falsified by them—even though we regard this entire process as infidelity at its root—so the Rafida “won” around eighty percent of the seats on the local council. They were not satisfied to allow the Sunnis to be more than to be doormen and cleaners for the Rafida Magians. With the help of God, this will never be.

Second: We are the umma of Islam, a nation whose intelligence and genius history has proven. Behold the Soviet Crusading disbeliever: when he fled from Afghanistan, he left behind a hireling government under the leadership of [Muhammad] Najibullah. That wretched one was, outwardly, a Sunni who displayed much religiosity, yet the Afghan Muslims did not cease [pursuing him] until they hanged him in the centre of Kabul. Likewise, look at the [Muslim] Brotherhood’s puppet government under [Abdulrab Rasul] Sayyaf and [Burhanuddin] Rabbani: when it came in on the backs of American tanks, the mujahideen were not deceived by it, and they did not cease [attacking it] until the occupier himself threw it on the garbage heap of history. We, the people of Iraq, praise be to God, are free Arabs—and more than that, we are Muslim heroes. History has recorded our charges, and the present has proven the sincerity of our men and the strength of our might. By the grace of God, the people of Iraq are no less perceptive than their Afghan brothers, and their concern for their deen is equal to theirs, if not greater.

Third: The same God who commanded us to fight the disbelieving occupier is also the One who commanded us to fight the occupier’s agents [umala]. Rather, He, the Almighty, incited us to fight disbelievers among our close kin above the distant enemy. He said: “O you who believe, fight those kuffar [disbelievers] who are close to you and let them find harshness in you” [9:123]. Abu Ja’far al-Tabari said: “Allah, Exalted be His mention, says to those who believe in Him and His Messenger: ‘O you who have believed in Allah and His Messenger, fight the disbelievers who are near to you before those who are farther away. Begin by fighting those geographically closer to you before those who are more distant.” Ibn Kathir, may Allah have mercy on him, said: “And for this reason, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) began by fighting the idolaters in the Arabian Peninsula.” End quote. So what if this disbeliever is a ruler over our lands? And what if he is a servile agent and follower of our enemy? Indeed, the issue of shari’a and governance is the central axis of our jihad, and it must never be absent from the minds of our men. We repeat once more: we do not fight for land; we fight so that the Word of Allah will be supreme on Earth.

Finally, after the “Dignity Plan” [or “Plan of Dignity”], by God’s grace and favour, achieved its goals—the core of which was to thwart the vicious assault on the jihad and its people militarily, in the media, socially, and economically—and after these victories were crowned with the announcement by Aswad Washington [the Black (Man) of Washington or Washington’s Black (Man)] of a timetable for withdrawal and his implicit admission of defeat, and the change in the method of operation in the Land of the Two Rivers: accordingly, we now announce the conclusion of the Dignity Plan and the launch of a new plan, whose objectives and operational pillars have been carefully drawn up to suit the conditions and events of the current and upcoming phase. We have named it “The Harvest of Good” [Hasad al-Khayr]. With God’s help and support, both enemy and friend will perceive the impact of this plan in the next phase.

We ask God for assistance, direction, patience, and steadfastness, for the duty of this new and critical phase necessitates Sunnis taking a sincere stand against the Crusader-Magian alliance, so that Baghdad is not sold cheaply to the Magians of Iran and their agents. Already they have begun to trickle into the Baghdad of [Harun] al-Rashid like conquerors, while once they would never have entered it except as slaves shackled in chains.

We extend a hand of forgiveness [or pardon] and support to every Muslim in the Land of the Two Rivers and beyond, regardless of what he has done in the past, hoping that everyone realises the gravity of the new reality in Iraq and in the world as a whole, and of the complex alliances and deceptions being plotted against Islam and its people. We hope to put all the problems and tensions of the past behind us. We require for this front and this alliance only that whoever is in it be a Muslim striving to establish God’s law and to honour His deen, according to the manhaj [methodology] of Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jamaa.

In conclusion, I say to the Muslims everywhere who are watching the fierce military and media assault on the Islamic State in the Land of the Two Rivers: Do not fear, and do not worry about the jihad in Iraq. Be reassured: the [worst] intensity of the wave has broken. A structure built from the skulls of martyrs, and whose soil was kneaded with the blood of the noble [or virtuous: al-fudala], is a structure of truthfulness [sidq], more firmly rooted than mountains and more unreachable than the stars. And it is inconceivable that the Most Generous, the Most Merciful, would let their sacrifices go in vain. Indeed, after them, lions have carried the banner—severe against their enemies, merciful among themselves.

“God has full power over His affairs, but most men know not” [12:21].

Your brother,

Abu Umar al-Qurayshi al-Baghdadi

 

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NOTES

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[1] The speech’s title in Arabic is: “حصاد الخير (سيهزم الجمع ويولون الدبر)”, Hasad al-Khayr (Sayahzam al-jam’u wa-yuwalluna al-dubur).

[2] By the spring of 2009, the Islamic State movement had lost all of its overt territorial holdings and been forced out of most urban environments—but not all. Where IS was flushed out almost entirely from Anbar and lost much of its capacity to operate in western Iraq, IS held on in Mosul: there was no Ninawa Awakening to assist the U.S. in uprooting the jihadists and the Arab-Kurdish Faultline, among other things, gave enough passive support in the city that IS would never lose the foothold. It is not that IS was on the rise by early 2009, but it was ceasing to be on the decline: in the sanctuaries IS had in the north of Arab Iraq, it essentially remained. By later in 2009—under the aegis of the Harvest of the Good operation—IS was beginning to recover and expand, continuing through 2010 until it was decisively on the upswing by mid-2011, imposing a shadow dominance on basically all of its former key sanctuaries. In this way, IS conditioned the patterns of social life and political authority so that many of its core operational zones did not experience the transition to overt caliphal rule in 2014, once IS was strong enough to hold territory again, as a radical rupture.

The reduction in IS’s terrorist activity due to the Surge and Sahwa was undeniable: over 600 IS operations per month for most of the period from May 2006 to August 2007 was halved by December 2007 and sustainably driven down to around 200 by December 2008. One could find optimism in the relative scarcity of “major” attacks—those killing more than five people—which dropped from sixty in the May 2006-July 2007 timeframe to thirty by September 2007 and never reached above twenty from May 2008 to the end of 2010, with the absolute nadir in February 2009 (four major attacks). The problem with such optimism was: this was still an extraordinary amount of violence! 300 or so Iraqis continued being killed every month.

More important in many ways than the pace of attacks was the fact that, even at the worst moments, IS maintained the ability to conduct “spectacular” attacks pretty much everywhere in Iraq, including against highly fortified targets, and in Baghdad. Just three weeks after this speech, on 10 April 2009, a Tunisian IS suicide bomber struck Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul, killing five American soldiers. IS attacks on the U.S. had been rare in the preceding year, making this all the more shocking, but it was in-keeping with the changes—formalised at the end 2009 in the “Strategic Plan”—to mostly focus on local enemies, while hitting the U.S. intermittently to avoid them gaining a perception their presence was cost-free. Two weeks later, IS inflicted a devastating twin suicide attack on the Shi’a shrine of Musa al-Kadhim (the Seventh Imam) and his grandson in Kadhimiya, Baghdad, massacring sixty people and wounding 150. Both of these attacks were under the Harvest of the Good banner, important quick “successes” for IS that gave it the credibility of matching its actions to its messaging.

In August, October, and December 2009, IS carried out massive coordinated suicide car bombings against government ministries in the centre of Baghdad, murdering over 100 people and wounding 500 or more each time. These were all Harvest of the Good operations, as were the bombings of foreign Embassies in Baghdad in April 2010, the horrendous massacre at the Syriac Catholic church in Baghdad on 31 October 2010, the truck bombing targeting policemen in Hilla in May 2011, the staggering wave of attacks in seventeen cities on 15 August 2011, and the fourteen bombings in Baghdad on 22 December 2011. The message of this last attack, hitting mostly Shi’a areas of the capital exactly a week after the last U.S. troops had left, was unmistakeable, and IS’s other primary foe—its Sunni rivals in the Awakening—were put on notice in March 2012 when IS temporarily occupied Haditha and slaughtered a pre-prepared list of “traitors”. Terrorism is often called “propaganda of the deed”, and the Harvest of the Good was an exemplar: the physical acts secondary to the cumulative psychological and political impact they produced in affirming that IS remained and could reach its enemies wherever they were, sapping Awakening morale and stoking Shi’a paranoia, with all that entailed for the abuse of Sunnis to whom IS could then offer itself as protector.

Operation Harvest of the Good was effectively ended by the declaration of the “Breaking the Walls” campaign in July 2012. It was a testament to Abu Umar’s achievement that IS had internalised his innovation of naming its operations, and that the Harvest of the Good terrorism—in producing political effects that got IS’s insurgency back online—had put IS in position to announce in advance that it was coming to free jihadist prisoners and then make good on it over the next year. The Breaking the Walls jailbreaks put capable IS operatives back on the battlefield, fortifying the insurgency yet further, and eroding the will of Sunnis to stand against it. By the time of the final Breaking the Walls operation at Abu Ghraib and Taji in July 2013, after which IS retired the operation and declared the “Soldiers’ Harvest” campaign, IS’s momentum and ranks had been additionally boosted by the Shi’a-led government’s crackdown that put the final nails in the coffin of the Awakening and pushed most Sunnis back into the IS fold. Fallujah fell to IS in January 2014 and the road to the conquest of a third of Iraq and the caliphate declaration was open.

The trendline in Iraq in the last years of the U.S. presence was generally misread contemporaneously (and Iraq was significantly ignore after that, thus the “shock” when the caliphate was proclaimed in June 2014). Joint U.S.-Iraqi counter-terrorism operations had great success in picking apart IS networks and hunting down IS’s leadership through 2009, culminating in the near-total decapitation of IS in April-June 2010, including the killing of Abu Umar and his deputy, Abd al-Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir). The problem was that focusing on emirs and territory occupied by the jihadists mistook the metrics for assessing organisational health. IS had understood in a way that the Iraqi government and the Americans had not that the contest between a state and an insurgency is a political war, more than a military one. The U.S. and Baghdad interpreted the military victory of 2007-08 as a settled fact, where IS understood such victories come and go, but political victories of the kind it was scoring in 2009-11 through a model of phased insurgency that could be tailored to each theatre around the country were more enduring.

See also: Patrick B. Johnston et al. (2016, May 18), ‘Foundations of the Islamic State: Management, Money, and Terror in Iraq, 2005–2010’, RAND Corporation, pp. 25-26, 44-47.

[3] As Craig Whiteside has explained: “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 [al-Baghdadi] 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.”

[4] Abu Umar does not refer directly to the Sahwa (Awakening), the alliance of tribes and rival Islamist insurgents who joined with the American Surge to rout IS in 2007-08, and this is understandable since, while they are clearly part of the intended audience, the people Abu Umar is really directing his speech to are the rank-and-file Sunni Arabs. The anti-Shi’a sectarian framing of the bulk of the speech is part of this outreach—a call for Sunnis to unite against the threat of an Iranian- and U.S.-backed Shi’a government. All the same, it is notable that this call, which could be interpreted as weakness and even desperation—it is a marked contrast to the brutality IS showed in ruling swathes of Sunni Arab Iraq, without which there might never have been an Awakening—was within the framework of the strict condition that repentant Sunnis adhere to IS’s version of jihadism. Even at its lowest ebb, IS was unwilling to compromise on its ideology.

IS did not rely solely on enticement in what was ultimately a successful campaign to dismantle the Awakening. If IS reached Awakening operatives before they repented, they would be murdered, and those listening to Abu Umar will have been well-aware of that. Abu Umar had said as much in a speech six months earlier, and anti-Awakening assassinations had been taking place across Iraq since September 2007. But IS’s assassination campaign was discriminate, based on the premise, essentially true as it transpired, that the Awakening was an elite phenomenon, with the broad mass of Iraqi Sunni Arabs remaining much more amenable to IS’s cause, at least in comparison to the alternatives. This is why Abu Umar generally spoke softly towards the Sunni Arabs, presenting IS as of them and with them. The jihadists war, in this telling, was against the tribal and insurgent leaders who signed on with the Awakening—the “traitors” collaborating with the Shi’a and the Americans. This narrative proved to have a lot of force: the Awakening leaders were often assassinated in the 2009-14 period with the approval of (usually younger) kinsmen, who then took on leadership roles and brought their tribes and groups (or parts of them) back into the jihadist fold.

IS’s program of inducement and (limited) terror to restore its supremacy among Iraq’s Sunni Arabs would crystallise at the end of 2009. Abu Umar was killed a few months later, but his vision of how to handle the tribes outlived him—the first speech by the official spokesman after Abu Umar was silenced, Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani), in August 2011, was explicit in following the fallen emir’s guidance (“we still hope you [ordinary Sunnis] will repent to God. That’s why we only kill your leaders and those whom we despair of their repentance.”)—and IS’s success on that front was a key factor in enabling the conquests that set the stage for the caliphate declaration in 2014.

[5] Baqir Solagh, a.k.a. Bayan Solagh and Baqir Jabr al-Zubaydi, is a senior leader of what was once the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), now renamed the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). Abu Umar’s namechecking of Al-Zubaydi is a good example of how IS has used very real facts of life for Sunni Arabs in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Husayn to legitimise itself.

SCIRI is committed to absolute wilayat al-faqih, the ideology of the Islamic Revolution that conquered Iran in 1979, and, therefore, regards itself as totally obedient to the Iranian Supreme Leader. Indeed, SCIRI was created by the guardians of the Islamic Revolution—the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)—and SCIRI initially functioned as the “political wing” of the Badr Corps, a militia comprised of Iraqis loyal to the Supreme Leader that was raised by the IRGC to fight on the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

In the immediate years after Saddam’s ouster, Iran spun off from Badr a series of Shi’a militias or “Special Groups” in Iraq that simultaneously fought the Americans from outside the government and became powerful within the new Iraqi state, infiltrating its military and security forces. This process was given cover at the centre in Baghdad—hidden from the Americans behind legalese and other misinformation—by Iranian agents in the “civilian” political class, men just like Solagh/Al-Zubaydi. The SCIRI-Badr case was far from exceptional in blurring the line between “civilian” and “militant” in Iraq since 2003: many in the Shi’a and Sunni Arab elite did politics by day, and terrorism by night. Al-Zubaydi is merely a blatant instance, since he is a “former” commander of the Badr Corps. (SCIRI and Badr formally decoupled in 2007, and the two really are now separate.)

From April 2005 to May 2006, Al-Zubaydi was the head of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the key institution captured by Iran early on in the post-Saddam transition. By holding the Interior Ministry, Iran was able to dominate the police, setting itself well on the way to forging a “Deep State” in Iraq that could exert practical, street-by-street control of the country, irrespective of the formal decisions of the Iraqi government. Al-Zubaydi was Interior Minister when the Jadriya bunker, a secret prison where hundreds of “disappeared” Sunnis were tortured, was discovered in November 2005, an episode that has recurred in IS propaganda ever since, since it symbolised how extensively Sunnis were being persecuted by the Iranians, operating behind the façade of the U.S.-supported Iraqi state—and just how far sectarian violence had already spread in Iraq by that point.

This background meant that after IS blew up of the Shi’a Askari mosque in Samarra in February 2006, triggering full-scale inter-confessional civil war, many Iraqi Sunnis could maintain that the aggression had not come from their “side”. This tendency was reinforced by the Shi’a “side” largely consisting of Iran’s death squads wearing uniforms issued by Al-Zubaydi’s Interior Ministry, whose atrocities against Sunnis were novel only in their scale. While this carnage happened all around the country, often in a frighteningly capricious tit-for-tat manner between Iran and IS, in Baghdad the Iranian militias’ purpose was more focused: the expulsion of Sunnis from strategic areas in and around city. The Surge and Sahwa pacified the Sunni Arab provinces (except Mosul and other areas of Ninawa), but in the capital it was this violent disaggregation of communities more than anything that brought the mayhem to an end: the violence tapered off in 2007-08 because Iran’s Shi’a militias had largely achieved their objective.

Al-Zubaydi’s history and reputation made his position untenable to the Americans once the civil war “properly” started, and in May 2006 he moved over to become the Finance Minister (a post he held until December 2010). The appointment of a more technocratic and reformist figure as Interior Minister did little to alter Al-Zubaydi’s actual day-to-day “job”: he is a man steeped in blood from the 2006-08 civil war and everyone knows it. Nor was that the last hecatomb Al-Zubaydi was a party to. Al-Zubaydi was the Iraqi Transport Minister from September 2014 to August 2016, where a key (if unadvertised) part of his responsibilities was coordinating the Iranian overflights to support the Shi’a jihad in Syria that rescued Bashar al-Asad’s regime.