By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 6, 2016
(source)
Last night Donald Trump unburdened himself of the view that Saddam Hussein was an efficient anti-terrorist operator. It is a statement Trump has made before, and it is one of such staggering ignorance—yet one which has such wide sympathy—that it seemed worth examining the multiple ways in which it was wrong. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 26, 2016
This essay, written to tie together my work on the relationship between the Saddam Hussein regime and the Islamic State, was completed last summer and submitted to an outlet, where it entered a form of development hell. After giving up on that option late last year, the opportunity arose to get a shorter version published in The New York Times in December. But I procrastinated too long over what to do with the full essay and a recent change in my work situation means I no longer have the bandwidth to go through the process of finding it a new home, so here it is.
“Abu-Bakr al Baghdadi is a product of the last decade of Saddam’s reign,” argues Amatzia Baram, a scholar of Iraq. He is correct in at least three ways. First, in its last decade in power, the Iraqi Ba’ath regime transformed into an Islamist government, cultivating a more religious, sectarian population on which the Islamic State (ISIS) could draw. Part of Saddam Hussein’s “Faith Campaign” also involved outreach to Islamist terrorists, including al-Qaeda, which meant that the synthesis of Ba’athism and Salafism that fused into the Iraqi insurgency after the fall of Saddam was already well advanced by the time the Anglo-American forces arrived in Baghdad in 2003. Second, the ISIS leadership and military planning and logistics is substantially reliant on the intellectual capital grown in the military and intelligence services of the Saddam regime. And finally, the smuggling networks on which ISIS relies, among the tribes and across the borders of Iraq’s neighbours, for the movement of men and materiel, are directly inherited from the networks erected by the Saddam regime in its closing decade to evade the sanctions. The advantages of being the successor to the Saddam regime make ISIS a more formidable challenge than previous Salafi-jihadist groups, and one that is likely to be with us for some time.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 2, 2016
An article in the twenty-second edition of al-Naba, the Islamic State’s (IS) newsletter, released on 15 March 2016, explained why the group has not made fighting Israel a priority.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 25, 2016
Abd al-Rahman al-Qaduli (Abu Ali al-Anbari) in an Islamic State video in May 2016
United States Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced this morning that he believed Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, a senior leader of the Islamic State (IS), had been killed in a U.S. raid into Syria earlier this week. Al-Qaduli was “serving as a finance minister” and had been “responsible for some external affairs and plots,” said Carter. America is “systematically eliminating ISIL’s cabinet,” Carter went on, noting the alleged killing of Tarkhan Batirashvili (Abu Umar al-Shishani) two weeks ago, adding that al-Qaduli’s removal will “hamper” IS in conducting operations inside and outside its caliphate. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 12, 2016
The “Victory Arch,” which Saddam built after the war with Iran. (January 2012)
About three weeks ago I wrote a piece for The New York Times explaining the evolution of Saddam Hussein’s regime away from the hard-secularism of its Ba’athist origins, and how this had prepared the ground for the Islamic State (IS). I received much positive feedback, but the social media reaction was inevitable: little thought and much anger, particularly from people who view Iraqi history through a political prism and felt I was trying to exculpate George W. Bush. With rare exceptions, the critique could hardly be called thoughtful. So it is nice to finally have such a critique to deal with, from Samuel Helfont and Michael Brill in today’s Foreign Affairs. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 29, 2015
In the last month, the Islamic State (IS) has been waging a concerted campaign to shut down all independent sources of information emanating from its statelet. IS’s focus has been on Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), an activist group that began in April 2014 in IS’s de facto capital in northern Syria. RBSS has published information—including pictures and videos, much of it via Twitter—on the crimes of the “caliphate”. IS has now murdered at least five RBSS journalists and activists, two of them on foreign soil in Turkey, plus the father of one of RBSS’s founders. (The sixth case, also in Turkey, is more murky.) The suppression of independent media by IS is necessary to allow the group to maintain social control of the areas it rules and to sustain the narrative that it is building utopia on earth, which attracts in the foreign fighters that help IS maintain and expand its territory.
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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 23, 2015
Published in The New York Times.
Whom should we blame for the Islamic State? In the debate about its origins, many have concluded that it arose from the American-led coalition’s errors after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, the groundwork for the emergence of the militant jihadist group was laid many years earlier by the government of Saddam Hussein.
The Arab nationalist Baath Party, which seized power in 1968 in a coup in which Mr. Hussein played a key role, had a firmly secular outlook. This held through the 1970s, even as religiosity rose among the Iraqi people. But soon after Mr. Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, it began to change.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 12, 2015
From top left clockwise: Fadel al-Hiyali, Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), Adnan al-Bilawi, Samir al-Khlifawi (Haji Bakr), Adnan as-Suwaydawi (Abu Ayman al-Iraqi), Hamid az-Zawi (Abu Omar al-Baghdadi), Abu Hajr as-Sufi
Yesterday, Reuters had an article by Isabel Coles and Ned Parker entitled, “How Saddam’s men help Islamic State rule“. The article had a number of interesting points, but in its presentation of the movement of former (Saddam) regime elements (FREs) into the leadership structure of the Islamic State (IS) as a phenomenon of the last few years, it was a step backward: the press had seemed to be recognizing that the Salafization of the FREs within IS dates back to the Islamization of Saddam Hussein’s regime in its last fifteen years, notably in the 1990s after the onset of the Faith Campaign. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 10, 2015
Samir al-Khlifawi (Haji Bakr): in Saddam’s intelligence service, in American prison, as a commander of the Islamic State
In the last few months I’ve increasingly focussed on the former (Saddam) regime elements (FREs) within the Islamic State (IS). There’s now an entire section on this blog about it, and Aaron Zelin over at Jihadology recently gave me time to elaborate in a podcast.
In studying this topic there is one inescapable name: Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, better-known by his pseudonym Haji Bakr, and sometimes by his kunya, Abu Bakr al-Iraqi. Al-Khlifawi is a former colonel in an elite intelligence unit of the Saddam Hussein regime—focussed on air defence at Habbaniya airbase, though what exactly that entails is murky. Al-Khlifawi was also apparently involved in weapons development.
Al-Khlifawi came to international attention in April when Christoph Reuter published an article in Der Spiegel naming al-Khlifawi as the “architect” of IS’s expansion into Syria, and the man who had been “pulling the strings at IS for years.” Continue reading
Book Review: The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Life of an Iraqi Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny (2009) by Wendell Steavenson
By Kyle Orton
(@KyleWOrton) on October 24, 2015
Wendell Steavenson’s The Weight of a Mustard Seed—the title drawn from a verse of the Qur’an about the difference between attaining heaven and hell—comprises five years of research about Kamel Sachet Aziz al-Janabi, one of Saddam Hussein’s favourite and most senior generals.
Born in 1947, Kamel Sachet joined the Iraqi police straight from school in the mid-1960s and joined the army in 1975. Sachet was soon in the Special Forces, training in mountain warfare in Germany in 1978, taking part in joint exercises with Iranian Special Forces during the time of the Shah—learning Farsi along the way—and then being part of the Iraqi Special Forces advanced party sent to invade Iran after Ruhollah Khomeini’s takeover. Sachet would later be part of the elite forces sent to secure Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. After Saddam was evicted from Kuwait, Sachet, who had been slipping deeper and deeper into religious zeal from the early 1980s, was made governor of Maysan where he ran a de facto Salafi commune. Sachet was eventually removed from this post by regime internal intrigue, and was moved to a job in the office of the president. For reasons never definitively established, Sachet was murdered on Saddam Hussein’s orders on the first day of Operation DESERT FOX in December 1998.
Kamel Sachet’s story is an interesting one for what it says about the Saddam regime’s changing attitude toward Islamism as it ran its course, reversing the hard-secular outlook that prevailed at varying degrees of intensity from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and transforming into an Islamist State in the last fifteen years of the regime. Continue reading
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