﻿BIRTH OF THE ISIS

It all began on March 19, 2003, the day the United States decided to attack Saddam Hussein's Iraq. A brief war that ended in the defeat of the Iraqi dictator and of his Baath party. As usual, the US was more worried about the immediate aspects of the conflict rather than its possible aftermaths. The war destroyed the country's main infrastructures; there followed situations of extreme want, with the population left without water, electricity, fuel and, for the former members of the Baath party, without the minimum means of survival. The US thought that they would be welcome, after all, they had ousted a bloodthirsty autocrat; they thought that they had exported democracy.





Saddam Hussein



A fertile ground



Only the Shiite population saw a possible profit to be derived from the ousting of the dictator. Although they represented the majority of Iraq's population, Iraqi Shiites had always been outcasts, persecuted by the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. After the conflict, their liking for the US was immediately invalidated by two elements: one of a practical nature (the worsening conditions after the war had nullified the people's liking for the “liberators”) and the other of a political nature (all of the main Shiite groups opposing Saddam had found refuge and assistance in Iran, where they had knitted a very tight network).



During the social upheaval caused by the conflict, the Shiites took over the scepter of power and the Sunni were marginalized. Surprisingly, this counter-discrimination found fertile ground in the choices of the person called in by the US to administer the post-war transition, Paul Bremer. His first directive, on May 16, 2003, stated that former members of the Baath party would not be allowed to hold public office. The directive number 2 of the Coalition Provisional Authority (the US-propelled international group that was supposed to lead the transition), dated May 23, 2003, dismantled the army and the Iraqi intelligence agencies.



In Saddam's days the Armed Forces, made up almost exclusively of Sunnis, counted roughly 500 thousand men in their ranks. Additionally, Baath party supporters in Ministries and other public structures were in the millions. Bremer's directives landed a few million Iraqi families on the sidewalk and – this is the dangerous part – forced many to join the ranks of the opposition while the ones with military know-how tried to find a military solution to the social conflict. These are the premises for the birth of the warfare against the new Shiite leadership in Baghdad.





Abu Musab al Zarqawi



The seed of terrorism



It is this context that sees the rise of Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaileh, also known by his battle name of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, from Zarqa, Jordan, already known to the local prisons as a common criminal turned extremist while sojourning up the river. Once released, around the years 1989-1992, Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets, there, he commanded his own fighting group called “Jund al Sham” (The army of Syria). Upon his return to Jordan, Zarqawi actively supported subversive activities against the Hashemite reign. In 1994, he was arrested for plotting against King Hussein (weapons and explosives were found in his house). Zarqawi was released five years later thanks to the amnesty that followed the rise to the throne of King Abdullah II. Soon after his release, Zarqawi was accused again of carrying out subversive activity against the Jordanian reign but, by then, he had fled to Afghanistan. Zarqawi remained in Afghanistan until, after 9/11, the US decided to wage war against the Taliban.



Abu Musab al Zarqawi moved to Iraq after the second Gulf War and was able to use the Sunni resentment against the Shiites in Baghdad to fuel terrorist activities since April 2003, just a month after the US invasion took place. During the war, Zarqawi teamed up first with a Kurd separatist militia called “Ansar al Islam” (The partisans of Islam), then formed his own group. In 2004, the US Department of State placed a bounty on Zarqawi's head worth 10 million dollars.



Around that same time, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarrai, aka Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, was captured and detained in the Camp Bucca prison by the US authorities. The US arrested al Baghdadi because of his connections to Al Qaeda. Inside the prison of Bucca, however, al Baghdadi made friends with other terrorists, whom he will later recruit to found the ISIS. Additionally, al Baghdadi got to know a number of Baathist officials who would later support him during his military campaign.



In virtue of his Afghan experience, Abu Musab al Zarqawi led his war with the blessing of Ayman al Zawahiri and of Al Qaeda. He did so by lending an umbrella organization to a number of terrorist factions, the “Jama'at al Tawhid wal Jihad” (Association for the unity and Jihad), later renamed “Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn” (Organization of the Jihad of al Qaeda in the country of the two rivers, i.e. Mesopotamia). The US had since raised the bounty on Zarqawi's head to 25 million dollars, as much as Osama bin Laden and his mentor Ayman al Zawahiri, and added the acronym AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq) to the terror list.





Abu Bakr al Baghdadi