The Rise of Islamic State Read Free Page B

of money from the kings and emirs of the Gulf. The secular, non-sectarian opponents of the long-established police states were soon marginalized, reduced to silence, or killed. The international media was very slow to pick up on how the nature of these uprisings had changed, though the Islamists were very open about their sectarian priorities: in Libya, one of the first acts of the triumphant rebels was to call for the legalization of polygamy, which had been banned under the old regime.
    ISIS is the child of war. Its members seek to reshape the world around them by acts of violence. The movement’s toxic but potent mix of extreme religious beliefs and military skill is the outcome of the war in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003 and the war in Syria since 2011. Just as the violence in Iraq was ebbing, the war was revived by the Sunni Arabs in Syria. It is the government and media consensus in the West that the civil warin Iraq was reignited by the sectarian policies of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. In reality, it was the war in Syria that destabilized Iraq when jihadi groups like ISIS, then called al-Qaeda in Iraq, found a new battlefield where they could fight and flourish.
    It was the US, Europe, and their regional allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates that created the conditions for the rise of ISIS. They kept the war going in Syria, though it was obvious from 2012 that Assad would not fall. He never controlled less than thirteen out of fourteen Syrian provincial capitals and was backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the only peace terms he was offered at the Geneva II peace talks in January 2014 was to leave power. He was not about to go, and ideal conditions were created for ISIS to prosper. The US and its allies are now trying to turn the Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria against the militants, but this will be difficult to do while these countries are convulsed by war.
    The resurgence of al-Qaeda–type groups is not a threat confined to Syria, Iraq, and their near neighbors. What is happening in these countries, combined with the growing dominance of intolerant and exclusive Wahhabite beliefs within the worldwide Sunni community, means that all 1.6 billion Muslims, almost a quarterof the world’s population, will be increasingly affected. It seems unlikely that non-Muslims, including many in the West, will be untouched by the conflict. Today’s resurgent jihadism, having shifted the political terrain in Iraq and Syria, is already having far-reaching effects on global politics, with dire consequences for us all.

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The Battle of Mosul
    On June 6, 2014, ISIS fighters began an attack on Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. Four days later, the city fell. It was an astonishing victory by a force numbering some 1,300 men against a nominal 60,000-strong force including the Iraqi army and federal and local police. Like much else in Iraq, however, the disparity in numbers was not quite what it looked like. Such was the corruption in the Iraqi security forces that only about one in three of them was actually present in Mosul, the rest paying up to half their salaries to their officers to stay on permanent leave.
    Mosul had long been highly insecure. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (as ISIS had formerly been known) had alwaysmaintained a strong presence in this overwhelmingly Sunni city of two million. For some time they had been able to extract protection money from businesses on a regular basis. In 2006 a businessman friend of mine in Baghdad told me that he was closing his cell phone shop in Mosul because of the payments he had to make to al-Qaeda. Exaggerated accounts of the success of the US troop surge the following year, which supposedly crushed al-Qaeda, ignored the militants’ grip on Mosul. A few weeks after the fall of the city, I met a Turkish businessman in Baghdad who said that he had held a large construction contract in Mosul over the last few years.