Nobody was convinced by my writing on Isis, until it was too late

In June 2014 I was attending an academic conference focusing on the Syrian crisis in Amman in Jordan. I and another lone professor said that the most important development over the previous two years in Syria and Iraq was the swift increase in the strength and territorial control of Isis. Our arguments were received with polite scepticism by the assembled experts who were eager to get back to discussing the intricacies of Syrian politics.

I stayed on a day in Amman after the conference, to see a friend. In the morning, I noticed that the news wires were saying that Isis had launched multiple attacks in northern and central Iraq. This was their usual tactic: highly mobile assault groups in pick-ups striking at many targets at the same time to confuse the Iraqi army and prevent it knowing where the main attack would be until it was too late. In this case, it turned out to be directed against Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq with a population of 2 million.

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I had been writing about Isis for over a year, explaining that it already controlled a vast territory in western Iraq and eastern Syria and should be taken very seriously. Six months earlier, it had seized Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, and the Iraqi army had failed to recapture the city. I had made the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then a little-known figure, my Middle East man of the year in The Independent at the end of 2013.

Nobody seemed very interested or convinced by what I was writing, though the threat posed by Isis should have been self-evident. President Barack Obama had deprecated their prospects, comparing them to a junior basketball team playing out of its league.

All this changed within hours of the fall of Mosul. Isis became the international bogeyman, a perception that increased when al-Baghdadi declared in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul that he was re-establishing a caliphate with himself as caliph. He and his movement ensured their international demonisation by carrying out and publicising atrocities in order to spread terror, leaving no doubt about their murderous cruelty.

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I flew to Baghdad a few days after the fall of Mosul and found an atmosphere of subdued panic. Isis fighters had taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home city, and there did not seem to be much to stop them pushing on to the capital. I stayed at first in the Coral Baghdad Hotel in the al-Jadriya district, a pleasant place, but I soon made the unnerving discovery that I was the only guest. I accepted an invitation to stay with my friend Ammar al-Shahbander, who ran the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and whose residence was better defended than my hotel. He told me he did not think that Isis could take Baghdad, but even so I found him one morning adjusting the sights of a Kalashnikov assault rifle. He was right about Isis and Baghdad and he was also right to be wary: Ammar was killed by an Isis bomb the following year.

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Iraqi state television kept announcing victories, which reassured nobody because there were no pictures of them and they were obviously imaginary. I was working with a former Iraqi police officer who would ring up serving officers in the path of the Isis advance and they would keep us posted about its current location. One officer, for instance, who lived in Baiji – the site of Iraq’s largest oil refinery – said that Isis had taken the town, but they had not been able to fight their way into the refinery complex. Their fighters were going door-to-door in the town, checking IDs and photocopying those of unmarried women. Locals were nervous, fearing their daughters might be forcibly married to Isis fighters.

Was there a moment when the Isis blitzkrieg could have captured Baghdad? I often thought about this in the following years. If there was such a moment, it was brief: the Iraqi capital has a population of 7 million, the majority of whom are Shia. The Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, with immense authority over the Shia community in Iraq, had issued a fatwa, on 13 June, that was a call to arms and this was being swiftly answered by tens of thousands of ill trained but very determined young men prepared to fight to the death.

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The Isis strategy of seeking to terrify its enemies into flight or submission, by showing pictures of its massacres, worked with some, but overall it was counterproductive. This was to be a main reason for both the initial success and ultimate defeat of Isis. It declared war on almost everybody: Shia and Kurds, Russians and Americans, Yazidis and Christians. Even Turkey’s friendly neutrality towards Isis at the beginning – the Turks did not impede 40,000 foreign fighters crossing the Turkish-Syrian border and joining Isis – did not win its permanent friendship.

Not everybody wanted to fight Isis at first. The Kurds in Iraq and Syria would have been quite happy to let Isis attack central government forces, while they created de-facto independent states. But in August of that year, Isis in Iraq launched a surprise attack on the region ruled by the Kurdistan regional government, thereby bringing in the US and, above all, devastating US air power. Soon afterwards, Isis besieged the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, which was only saved by US airstrikes. American air power and Kurdish ground troops were to be the nemesis of Isis in Syria, and the so-called caliphate, once as big as Great Britain, lost its last village in early 2019.

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Many people ask me if Isis could revive. The atrocities it inspires, if it does not directly order them, can still dominate the news agenda, as we saw with the London Bridge attack this month. President Trump’s on-off withdrawal from Syria, the breaking of the Kurdish-US alliance and the Turkish invasion have created the sort of chaos in Syria that Isis can exploit. The same is true of the turmoil in Iraq after more than two months of mass protests and bloody-but-failed government suppression.

Opportunities may be there for Isis, but it is enfeebled by defeat, has lost the element of surprise, and can no longer claim to be winning divinely inspired victories. The ingredients that went into its initial success may have made its long-term failure inevitable. But it was difficult to be quite so confident about that five years ago when its fighters were racing down the road towards Baghdad.

With its multi-pronged assault across central and northern Iraq in the past one and a half weeks, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) has taken over from the al-Qaeda organisation founded by Osama bin Laden as the most powerful and effective extreme jihadi group in the world.

Isis now controls or can operate with impunity in a great stretch of territory in western Iraq and eastern Syria, making it militarily the most successful jihadi movement ever.

While its exact size is unclear, the group is thought to include thousands of fighters. The last “s” of “Isis” comes from the Arabic word “al-Sham”, meaning Levant, Syria or occasionally Damascus, depending on the circumstances.

Led since 2010 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Abu Dua, it has proved itself even more violent and sectarian than what US officials call the “core” al-Qaeda, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is based in Pakistan.

Isis is highly fanatical, killing Shia Muslims and Christians whenever possible, as well as militarily efficient and under tight direction by top leaders.

The creation of a sort of proto-caliphate by extreme jihadis in northern Syria and Iraq is provoking fears in surrounding countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey that they will become targets of battle-hardened Sunni fighters.

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The Isis tactic is to make a surprise attack, inflict maximum casualties and spread fear before withdrawing without suffering heavy losses. Last Friday they attacked Mosul, where their power is already strong enough to tax local businesses, from family groceries to mobile phone and construction companies. Some 200 people were killed in the fighting, according to local hospitals, though the government gives a figure of 59 dead, 21 of them policemen and 38 insurgents.

Isis specialises in using militarily untrained foreign volunteers as suicide bombers, either moving on foot wearing suicide vests or driving vehicles packed with explosives. Often more than one suicide bomber is used, as happened when a vehicle exploded at the headquarters of a Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, in the town of Jalawla in the divided and much fought-over province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. In the confusion caused by the blast, a second bomber on foot slipped into the office and blew himself up, killing some 18 people, including a senior police officer.

The swift rise of Isis since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became its leader has come because the uprising of the Sunni in Syria in 2011 led the Iraqi Sunni to protest about their political and economic marginalisation since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Peaceful demonstrations from the end of 2012 won few concessions, with Iraq’s Shia-dominated government convinced that the protesters wanted not reform but a revolution returning their community to power. The five or six million Iraqi Sunni became more alienated and sympathetic towards armed action by Isis.

Isis launched a well planned campaign last year, including a successful assault on Abu Ghraib prison last summer to free leaders and experienced fighters. This January, they took over Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, and have held it ever since in the face of artillery and air attack. The military sophistication of Isis in Iraq is much greater than al-Qaeda, the organisation out of which it grew, which reached the peak of its success in 2006-07 before the Americans turned many of the Sunni tribes against it.

Isis has the great advantage of being able to operate on both sides of the Syrian-Iraq border, though in Syria it is engaged in an intra-jihadi civil war with Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and other groups. But Isis controls Raqqa, the only provincial capital taken by the opposition, and much of eastern Syria outside enclaves held by the Kurds close to the Turkish border.

Isis is today a little more circumspect in killing all who work for the government including rubbish collectors, something that alienated the Sunni population previously. But horrifically violent, though professionally made, propaganda videos show Isis forcing families with sons in the Iraqi army to dig their own graves before they are shot. The message is that their enemies can expect no mercy.