In August of 2004, General James Mattis, who then commanded all Marines in Iraq, confronted a group of influential Sunni religious leaders at a meeting in Fallujah. It was a particularly difficult time for Mattis’s Marines, who were fighting well-armed Anbari Sunnis who’d come under al-Qaeda’s command. As the religious leaders calmly sipped their tea, Mattis railed at them for preaching hatred. Why would they send their worshipers so willingly to their deaths against U.S. forces? he asked. The religious leaders eyed Mattis and said nothing. Mattis angrily raised his voice. “They’re kids,” he shouted. “Untrained, undisciplined teenagers. They don’t stand a chance.”

What Mattis and his senior staff officers were beginning to realize was that Anbar’s religious leaders were actually following the tactics institutionalized by Saddam’s Baathist regime, which used violence and torture to impose political discipline. “We had no illusions about how terrible the Saddam regime was,” Colonel Mike Walker, who served in Anbar during the surge, says. “They were horrific. We had videos of what they did. You became a made man in that regime by torturing people. By showing you could do it.”


Nor would it be a surprise to those U.S. military officers who served in Anbar more than a decade ago that that the blueprint for the Islamic State was first drafted by a former Baathist intelligence officer named Haji Bakr, according to a recent report in Der Spiegel based on documents the German magazine uncovered in Syria. Bakr, whose real name was Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, was a colonel in Saddam’s intelligence service who was killed in a firefight in January of 2014. Bakr’s Islamic State plan was not “a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’–a caliphate run by an organization that resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency,” the magazine says. Put simply, the Islamic State’s success “lies in a combination of opposites,” marrying the “fanatical beliefs” of fundamentalist Islam with “the strategic calculations” of Saddam’s virulent Baathism.

What the Der Spiegel article doesn’t say is that the roots of Baathist-Islamist cooperation run much deeper.

Last fall, Israeli political analyst Amatzia Baram argued in his book, Saddam Hussein and Islam, that the seeds of the Islamic State were actually planted by Saddam Hussein in 1986, when the Iraqi dictator made the fateful decision to forge ties between his secular Baath party and the leaders of Iraq’s more moderate Sunni religious community. Saddam envisioned was a a kind of arranged marriage rather than a steadfast alliance.

The new strategy did not mark a shift in Saddam’s view of religious leaders, who he’d regularly jailed, tortured and murdered. He remained an implacable enemy of Muslim extremist groups, like Al Qaeda (which emerged in 1988), despite Bush administration claims, since disproven, of a secret alliance between the two. (And had Saddam remained in charge of an intact regime, it’s likely that the Islamists would have remained under his control.) The strategy Saddam adopted was modest but far-reaching–he envisioned Islam as a force multiplier, a way to cloak his murderous regime in public respectability.

“Hussein’s decision was greeted skeptically by the Baath Party faithful, and was very controversial,” Baram told me after an appearance he made at Washington’s Wilson Center, “but he believed that marrying Baathism with Islam would strengthen his regime in Iraq’s Sunni heartland and build support for Iraq’s war with Shia Iran.” Then in its sixth year, Saddam’s war was going badly and had cost over 150,000 lives. “He needed help,” Baram says. So it was that, beginning in 1986, Saddam posed as “a kind of born-again Muslim” (as Baram describes him), with public posters showing the Iraqi dictator in combat uniform, praying.

It was in the late 1980s, Baram wrote to me in an email on April 24, that “the Baath regime under Saddam realized that they needed to abandon their secularism and atheism and jump on the Islamist bandwagon. They chopped the heads of young women for violating sharia, or religious law, by practicing ‘prostitution,’ and they severed the right hand and left leg for thieving, money laundering, embezzlement and more.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s caliph, Baram added, “is Saddam’s creation.” Haji Bakr, Baram concluded “was quite cynical, but he used Islam because it used people. ISIL is a Baath power structure with an Islamist ideology.”

That Saddam’s tilt to Islam led inexorably to the rise of the Islamic State is now an article of faith among a number of policymakers and an increasing large community of senior U.S. military officers. It is viewed as particularly credible by those Americans who served in Anbar during Operation Iraqi Freedom and the follow-on U.S. surge. What is happening now in Anbar, with Islamic State fighters facing off against Shia militias, was already happening in 2003, when Anbar’s Sunnis allied themselves with al-Qaeda to fight the Americans. The objective of battle is the same–over who controls Iraq–but the enemy has changed: then it was the Americans, now it is Iran. Then too there was a cross-pollination of tactics as Anbar’s Islamists inherited the regime’s institutionalized violence.

The same structure could be seen in Anbar in the wake of Saddam’s overthrow in 2003. Months before Mattis’s meeting with Anbar’s religious leaders, after the U.S. expelled al-Qaeda from Fallujah in a particularly bloody operation, the Marines turned the city over to the local “Fallujah Brigade.”

But when the brigade marched into the city, festooned with the green flag of Islam, the Marines were stunned to see the former Iraqi Republican Guard commander, General Jassim Mohammed Saleh, at their head. Jassim was decked out in the same Republican Guard uniform that he’d worn when, as one of Saddam prized commanders, he’d slaughtered Iraqi Shias during their uprising against Saddam ten years before. As Jassim eyed the Americans, the mosque’s loudspeaker blared out its triumphant message: “God has given this town victory over the Americans.”

The stand-in for Jassim was until recently Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was killed last week outside of Tikrit, by Shia militia forces. Al-Douri was one of Saddam’s favorites and was designated the “King of Clubs,” in the U.S. printed playing cards of wanted Saddamist officers. Like Jassim, al-Douri helped suppress the Shia uprising in southern Iraq in the wake of Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait and, like Jassim–and other Baathist officers–he’d taken up the mantle of Islam to cloak his nationalist ambitions. In recent years, he’d become the leader of the Sunni extremist Naqshbandi Army, which is allied with ISIL, just as Jassim had headed the Fallujah Brigade, which was allied with al-Qaeda.

At the heart of all of this, says David Reist, a retired brigadier general and Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, is Sunni Iraq’s relentless campaign against Shia Iran. “So the ‘King of Clubs’ was the head of a Sunni movement? Well, we shouldn’t be surprised,” Reist says. “These guys are Iraqi nationalists; they’re using Islam as a marriage of convenience. Sunni Islam is their vehicle, it’s what’s familiar to them.” It is in this context, in the sectarian conflict between Iraqi Sunnis and Iranian Shias, that the rise of the Islamic State should be seen, Reist insists. “There are people in the tribes who are wary of ISIL and willing to fight them,” he says, “but they are more wary of Iran [and the Shiites]. If it’s a choice between being ruled by your own, no matter how extreme, or being ruled by Iran there is really no choice at all. Anbar’s Sunnis will never, ever, tie their future to Iran.”

That the sectarian Sunni-Shia conflict is at the heart of the rise of ISIL helps to explain the deep and violent divide in Iraq, and across the Muslim world. And it also helps to explain the genesis of the Islamic State and the virulence of its adherents. Listening to Amatzia Baram explain ISIL is like listening to a scientist explain light: is light a wave or a particle? In fact, it’s both. Taken separately, neither extremist Islam nor virulent Baathism explain ISIL (just as neither particle or wave explain light), but taken together they do. ISIL is a twisted successor to Saddam’s secularist torture state, though cloaked in devout Islamist radicalism.

More simply, as the Der Spiegel article–and Amatzia Baram–imply, the seeds planted by Saddam Hussein in 1986 to help him in his war with Iran, and by Haji Bakr in 2003, were germinated long ago. The “radical Islamization and hissing sectarian malice,” as Baram describes it, is the key to understanding “the dark magic of ISIL”–as the expression of a conflict so old and so violent that the best option that we in the West may have for dealing with it is not to deal with it at all, while doing what we can to help its victims.