Baghdad-on-Sea: Iraqi’s Take Over Caspian Coast

A Case Study of the Islamic State as the Saddam Regime’s Afterlife: The Fedayeen Saddam

Saddam Hussein created the Fedayeen Saddam in 1994 as a paramilitary Praetorian unit. The Fedayeen were initially charged with protecting the regime from a repeat of the revolts that followed Saddam’s eviction from Kuwait by acting as a pre-emptive counter-insurgency force. Over time this internal security mission became increasingly about enforcing the Islamic law. Saddam had begun Islamizing his regime in the late 1980s, and intensified this in the early 1990s, attempting to create a synthesis of Ba’athism and Salafism to buttress his legitimacy. Saddam had begun Islamizing his foreign policy as early as 1982-83, making alliances with all manner of Islamist terrorists, thousands of whom came to Iraq for training in the 1990s, where they attended camps run by the Fedayeen. In the Fedayeen—connected to the global Islamist terrorist movement, combining elements of Ba’athism with an increasingly-stern Salafism—is a microcosm of the Saddam regime’s mutation into the Islamic State (ISIS).

In March 1991, after Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait had been reversed, two intifadas broke out inside Iraq—in the Kurdish north and the Shi’a south—and they would shape Saddam’s security calculations ever-afterward. Saddam would now see internal dissent, far more than any external actor, as the chief threat to his regime. To counter-act this threat, Saddam created paramilitaries—the Fedayeen Saddam (Saddam’s Men of Sacrifice), al-Jaysh al-Quds (the Army of Jerusalem), and the Ba’ath Party militia—of which the Fedayeen was primus inter pares that “swore loyalty not to Iraq but to its president“.

Saddam had always been distrustful of the official military, seeing it as the likeliest source of a coup. After Saddam executed a number of senior Generals, blaming them for the failure in Kuwait, despite the fact the senior Generals opposed the Kuwait invasion, trust between Saddam and the senior military leaders broke down entirely. The professional military complained that the Fedayeen starved them of scarce resources; this was not an accident. Saddam sought to check the power of the senior Generals with the militias, specifically the Fedayeen, which operated outside the usual lines of command, answerable to Saddam’s oldest son, the psychopathic Uday. The Fedayeen’s recruits were selected far more for their fanatical loyalty to the dictator rather than their military skill.

“Uday’s Fedayeen … were staffed by people who were not senior regime members and had little access to intelligence or important operations,” Joel Rayburn, a former intelligence officer and adviser to Gen. David Petraeus who wrote a history of Iraq, told me. “[Izzat ad-Douri] and his people were … powerful inside the regime and plugged into the inner circle,” Rayburn said, while the Fedayeen were the opposite. “Basically Uday had to create a force by recruiting from the leftovers, including Shi’a from Baghdad,” Rayburn added.

Still, the Fedayeen did what was needed: distributed throughout Iraq, especially the Shi’a south, they formed a pre-emptive counter-insurgency force, using espionage, intimidation, and violence in best KGB fashion to liquidate those who even might pose a threat to the regime, notably Shi’a clerics who were gaining too much popularity, such as Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq as-Sadr, the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shi’ites. ISIS has rather notably mobilized the same tactics of infiltration and pre-emptive assassination in the areas it conquers.

To evade the sanctions, Saddam set up a grey economy run by Douri, his deputy, which smuggled oil and other goods across Iraq’s borders, funding a patronage network of security services (including Saddam’s Praetorians like the Fedayeen), tribes, and criminal elements to hold the regime in place. Douri took the chance for personal enrichment and also set up a Freemason-style parallel network based on his Sufi Naqshbandi Order, which would be formally activated as an insurgent group, Jaysh Rijal at-Ṭariqa an-Naqshabandiya (JRTN), after Saddam was sent to the gallows and Douri took the leadership of the Ba’ath Party. It was this sub-State structure in toto, overwhelmingly Sunni Arab, melded with foreign-led Salafi-jihadists, that resisted the new order after Saddam’s overthrow, and it was this structure that spawned ISIS.

Douri also led the Faith Campaign, which formally began in June 1993, intensifying the internal Islamization process Saddam started no later than 1989. The State indoctrination added Salafism to the cult of the leader and the sensibilities of pan-Arabism, effectively creating a religious movement—”Ba’athist-Salafism”—under Saddam’s leadership. Alongside the Ba’athist-Salafists, the Faith Campaign empowered longstanding “pure” Salafist opponents of the regime. (Douri’s Sufism, ironically, was regarded as heretical by both.)

The “pure” Salafis were one of the trapdoors in the Faith Campaign, with some going on to launch terrorism against the regime, as were men like Grand Ayatollah Sadr, since the Campaign allowed Shi’a clerics more religious freedom, which ended up highlighting the potential power of Shi’a opposition.

The security services were deeply affected by the Faith Campaign. Sent for mandatory religious instruction and to infiltrate the mosques, many Ba’athists in the military and intelligence agencies took to the faith, some choosing Salafism over Saddam, not least as a source of comfort and a means of atonement for the atrocities they had committed. After the regime collapsed, the “former regime elements” (FREs) who formed the core of the insurgency were already religious fanatics in many cases and joined ISIS’s predecessors out of ideological sympathy. This was noticeably true of the Fedayeen Saddam, and became more true over time.

Alex Mello, the lead Iraq security analyst at energy advisory service Horizon Client Access, points out, “Despite its die-hard Saddamist affiliation the Fedayeen increasingly Islamized as the insurgency went on, a process undoubtedly accelerated after Saddam’s capture in December 2003.”

Douri thus laid the physical and ideological basis for ISIS.

By the time the Fedayeen were created in October 1994, Saddam had already begun his mosque-building campaign and subsidizing religious teachers and imams, making them their communities’ leaders, both policies laying the groundwork for the religiously-inspired post-Saddam insurgency. Gambling and public consumption of alcohol had already been banned, and zakat (the Islamic poor tax) and the shari’a punishment for theft (amputation) had already been imposed. In August 1994, the regime made prostitution a capital crime.

A good example of the Fedayeen acting as a mutaween (religious police)—and not-incidentally foreshadowing ISIS—was the beheading of women accused of prostitution, with swords, in front of their own homes, before an assembled crowd, with their “heads … left on the front doorsteps … as a deterrent.” Human rights groups say at least 200 women were beheaded in this way in the Saddam regime’s final two years.

Fedayeen Saddam

The Fedayeen produced gruesome propaganda videos showing barbarous acts—from eating live wolves to lurid forms of murder for “spies”—intended to further recruitment and to intimidate enemies. Military exploits by masked Fedayeen were also videoed and distributed. A focus was put on inculcating the “spirit” of the Fedayeen—believed by many senior Saddamists to be the “spirit” the regime needed to recover—in children, with camps set up where children were given guns and military training (again, on disseminated video). While corruption overtook the Saddam regime in the 1990s—even, in the compliment of vice to virtue, corruption within the regime’s organized, sanctions-busting criminality—the reaction to corruption (financial and moral) in the Fedayeen was ferocious:

Punishments … included having one’s hands amputated for theft, being tossed off a tower for sodomy, being whipped a hundred times for sexual harassment, having one’s tongue cut out for lying, and being stoned for various other infractions. … [M]ilitary failure also became punishable as a criminal offense.

There is more than an echo of ISIS in this.

When Saddam fell in April 2003, there were up to 95,000 FREs—soldiers, militiamen, and intelligence officers and agents—still under arms, including 30,000 Fedayeen Saddam. When Saddam’s Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, wrote to Saddam during the invasion that regime suicide bombers in civilian clothes should target the Americans to sow distrust and pre-emptively destabilize the occupation, it was almost certainly Fedayeen that Sabri had in mind for the job. The Fedayeen, often fighting in civilian garb, were almost the only force that did any fighting as the Coalition drove up to Baghdad.

The reason the Fedayeen were the main force resisting the invasion was because to the very last Saddam believed he would survive and the real threat was that a limited Coalition attack would spark a rebellion—again, internal dissent was seen as the primary challenge, not external attack. And let it be said, while the Fedayeen crumpled in the face of Anglo-American armed units, the Fedayeen succeeded against terrorized civilians. There was no Iraqi revolt during the invasion. As a man in Najaf explained, “How can I make an intifada? If I go outside the Fedayeen will kill me.”

To the extent Saddam saw an external foe during the invasion it was Iran, which he thought might capitalize on a Shi’ite revolt. Consequently, the networks of Fedayeen and other militias in their safe-houses throughout the Shi’a south, where they had been positioned since the mid-1990s to head-off a rebellion, were strengthened—accidentally laying the groundwork for a decentralized insurgency—and the main force of the regular army was placed along the border with Iran.

As part of maintaining internal security, the Fedayeen had used terrorism, including on at least one occasion a suicide bombing against the Kurds. But the Fedayeen’s terrorism was not confined within Iraq’s borders. Internal Iraqi documents show that an operation called “Blessed July” was planned for the summer of 1999 with fifty Fedayeen militiamen sent to bomb Iraqi opposition targets in the Kurdistan area, Iran, and London. What was targeted and if any of them were hit is unknown. The Fedayeen—referred to as “martyrs” throughout the documents—were reminded to use “death capsules” if captured in Europe.

Even when the Fedayeen technically were within Iraq’s borders, their contribution to terrorism was global. 4,000 foreign Salafi-jihadists were defending the Saddam during the invasion—just in Baghdad—and they were organized by the Fedayeen Saddam, and fought on well after the Republican Guards and other conventional units had called it quits. Not all of the foreign holy warriors in Iraq had arrived in the months before March 2003 when it was obvious an invasion was coming. Training camps in Iraq, most notoriously Salman Pak but Lake Tharthar, Samarra, Ramadi, and at least one near Baghdad that was so sophisticated it rivalled the training facilities of the American Marines, graduated at least 8,000 terrorists between 1998 and 2002. Whether al-Qaeda or the Taliban sent men to be trained at these camps is simply unknown, though al-Qaeda did have training camps on Iraqi soil before the Saddam regime fell, in Kurdistan.

The Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Islam, which ran these camps from early 2000 was essentially a joint enterprise of the Saddam regime and al-Qaeda. Led by loyalists of Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, who had been granted seed money by Osama bin Laden in late 1999 for his terrorist organization in Taliban Afghanistan, Ansar had senior commanders who were Iraqi intelligence officers and was pretty openly supplied with money and weapons by Saddam. Zarqawi took direct leadership of Ansar in late 2002—he had been in Baghdad in May 2002 and then moved through the Levant setting up the networks that brought the foreign fighters into the New Iraq—and there is no doubt about the Fedayeen-Qaeda/Zarqawi connection in the aftermath of the regime. Ansar was deeply tied to the Fedayeen.

As mentioned above, there was some distance between the Fedayeen and Douri’s networks while the regime lasted and this continued afterward. But Douri and Mohammed Younis al-Ahmed, the masterminds of the Iraqi insurgency who had fled to Syria, were hardly scrupulous in their distribution of resources to those who could frustrate the Americans. The Douri/Younis network concentrated patronage on a core of professionals from the old regime, with the skills and local knowledge around which an insurgency could be (and was) built. Many of the FRE-dominated Ba’athist-Salafist insurgent units that Douri most heavily supported had important Fedayeen contingents and Douri had no qualms in helping the foreign-led Salafi-jihadists, a number of whom were brought into Iraq by Douri through connections he made during the Faith Campaign, with assassinations and sabotage. The Douri-linked FREs brought Ansar back into Iraq from Iran—where Ansar had fled during the invasion and been sheltered by the mullahs—and Douri put his stolen car business at the disposal of Zarqawi’s car bombers. In short, both the Fedayeen and Douri were supporting Ansar.

Two Ba’athist-Salafist insurgent groups with notable Fedayeen contingents were Jaysh al-Muhammad, probably the strongest insurgent unit in the immediate aftermath of the regime and one most directly controlled by Douri and Younis, and Jaysh al-Mujahideen (JAM). Interestingly, ISIS’s “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a member of JAM by 2006, though it is possible he was really a member of ISIS’s predecessor and had infiltrated JAM. There is also a report from Amatzia Baram, who has done much work on the Saddam regime’s Islamization and the way this mutated into ISIS, that al-Baghdadi actually “served” with the Fedayeen, though when and in what capacity is not specified.

The Fedayeen also provide a microcosm of the way the Assad regime has weaponized Salafi-jihadism and helped ISIS grow since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. After failing to repel the American invasion, “many ‘[Fedayeen] Saddam’ members fled to Syria, where they constituted the nucleus for the establishment of ISIS,” writes Baram. In March 2007, the U.S. apprehended a former Fedayeen leader “involved in setting up training camps in Syria for Iraqi and foreign fighters” in Mosul. Also notable, when ISIS decided in late 2011 to exploit the networks Assad had allowed them operate on Syrian soil to inject themselves into the uprising, one of the men in the advanced party that ISIS sent into Syria to set up Jabhat an-Nusra was Maysar Ali Musa al-Jabouri (a.k.a. Abu Mariyah al-Qahtani). Al-Qahtani is a former Fedayeen and had been active for ISIS’s predecessor in Mosul, where the Assad-supervised ratlines provided particularly strong support to the Iraqi insurgency. The exploitation of the Syria-based ISIS networks would go both ways: Assad (and Iran) would encourage ISIS’s growth to discredit and destroy the Syrian uprising.

The early, foreign-led leadership of ISIS has been picked off over the years, especially following the 2007 Surge and notably with the mass-cull of April-June 2010. With the flow of foreign fighters drying up in the 2007 to 2011 period, the replacements were Iraqis, and they were the most competent at counterintelligence and operational security: the FREs.

While none of the named top commanders of ISIS have yet been demonstrated to have Fedayeen background, the Fedayeen likely form an important part of ISIS’s “mid to upper-tier commanders,” Mello says. The Fedayeen’s role in logistics and facilitation within ISIS goes back to the early days of the insurgency. “Several insurgent cell leaders in Fallujah in 2004 were former Fedayeen accepted into Salafist groups on the condition they repudiated Saddam,” Mello continues. And the Fedayeen linked up with ISIS’s predecessors for terrorist attacks on the Coalition by drawing on “connections going back to their pre-invasion relationship with Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal-Jihad. Notably the leader of Zarqawi’s ‘Umar Brigade’ cell formed in 2005 tasked with attacks against Badr and other Shi’ite groups was a former Fedayeen.”

The Fedayeen did not have access to the intellectual capital and logistics capacity, such as the personal connections, that the senior military and intelligence officers did, so it makes sense that they would not rise to the apex of ISIS, but they would be the prime candidates when ISIS was repairing its mid- and upper-mid-level structure.

The Fedayeen helped imbue ISIS with the spirit of fanaticism and cruelty from the beginning, and by now, with all of the former Iraqi insurgent groups—and their Fedayeen contingents—subordinated to ISIS, their role must be relatively enhanced. The Fedayeen were a key part of Saddam’s Islamization program, internally and externally, linking the regime with Islamist terrorists around the world, and in the aftermath provided connections with al-Qaeda and its offshoots for the Salafized regime remnants. The Fedayeen was a crucial glue that helped bind the disparate elements of the Iraqi insurgency together as it transformed into ISIS.

The post A Case Study of the Islamic State as the Saddam Regime’s Afterlife: The Fedayeen Saddam appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

Saying Good to Riddance to Sectarian Quotas in Iraq

Protests in Iraq: An Indictment or Vindication of Iraqi Democracy?

19 women have been executed by ISIS for not having sex, Kurdish official says

Spokesperson of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Mosul, Mimousini, said on Monday, that ISIS had executed 19 women in Mosul, attributing the cause to refusing the practice of the so-called sexual jihad.

Mimousini said in an interview, “ISIS executed 19 women in the city of Mosul during the past two days,” claiming that, “the penalty decision came on the background of the refusal to participate in the practice of sexual jihad.”

He then added that the last period has seen splits in the ranks of ISIS in Mosul and internal conflicts because of the money and distribution of women.

The post 19 women have been executed by ISIS for not having sex, Kurdish official says appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

Was Saddam Hussein's Capture worth it?

Over 10 Years have passed and the question we are all asking…… was the #Iraq war worth it?

What do you think? If the Iraq war hadn't have happened we would still be stuck with the evil dictator Saddam Hussein.... but legitimate questions must be asked since Iraq has gone ten years since Saddam Hussein was captured and it is true that the ordinary Iraqi is having a terrible time. Much worse.

Three Cheers for Sistani

Lets Take A Look At The Iraq Stock Exchange

Did You Know Iraq Has Its Very Own China Town?

#VisitIraq The Beauty Of Tourism In Iraq

Feeding The Birds From a Bridge In Baghdad

Anbar: A Tale of Two Offensives

Karim Wasfi Plays His Cello At The Spot Of A Car Bomb

The Road To Iraq’s Future Runs Through Anbar

The Other Potential Conflict Which Lurks Beneath Iraq’s War Against ISIS

In Favour of a Federalized Iraq

How Music Can Play Its Part In Defeating Terror In Iraq

Erbil and Rojava

Mosul in a State of Panic after Iraqi Air Force drops Leaflets

Izzat ad Douri and ISIS

Written by Kyle W. Orton

Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s long-time deputy, was reported dead (again) on April 17. An audio message on May 15 disproved this. Douri was the implementer of the Saddam regime’s Islamization program in its later years and a key architect of the insurgency after the regime was overthrown, which helped pave the way for the Islamic State (ISIS). ISIS has now turned on Douri and his associates, but ISIS could not have risen to its current stature without Douri’s help.

The Faith Campaign

From the mid-1980s, Saddam’s regime formed connections with, and used, all manner of Islamist terrorist groups, very much including al-Qaeda, in its foreign policy, while internally the regime was Islamizing, and with the beginning of Saddam’s Islamic Faith Campaign in 1993 the Islamization accelerated, creating a Ba’athist-Salafist synthesis that has now morphed into ISIS, a group where nearly all the senior posts are held by ex-members of Saddam’s military-intelligence apparatus. It was Douri who oversaw the implementation of the Faith Campaign.

The Faith Campaign was “most likely a cynical step,” says Iraq scholar Amatzia Baram, and it is certainly true that the Campaign followed, rather than led, a major return to religiosity in Iraq as the sanctions-plus-Saddam regime took hold.

Saddam promoted Salafism as a counterweight to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Saddam regarded as a genuine threat after discovering in 1986-7 that the Brothers had been able to set up a network of cells across Iraq under the instruction of their Egyptian guide, Umar al-Tilmisani, committed to the overthrow of the government, Colonel Joel Rayburn, a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, writes in Iraq After America.

One of the key, though less advertised, aims of the Faith Campaign was to infiltrate religious institutions and communities and bring them under control. This didn’t work exactly as planned. Because “most of the officers who were sent to the mosques were not deeply committed to Baathism by that point, … many became more loyal to Salafism than Saddam,” Rayburn notes. Some graduates of the Faith Campaign left the Ba’athist component behind altogether and adopted a “pure” Salafism, which put them on a collision course with the regime; some “pure” Salafis were even executed after the launched terrorist attacks against the regime.

Still, the long-standing “purist” Salafi opponents of the regime were empowered alongside the Ba’athist-Salafists, Rayburn notes, and Saddam’s regime gave Iraq “an extra push in the direction of an authentic Islamization process,” as Baram puts it. It is for this reason that it is more accurate to refer to former regime elements (FREs) rather than “Ba’athists” in describing the personnel of the Saddamist military-intelligence apparatus who still operate in the Iraqi insurgency and ISIS: most FREs haven’t been Ba’athists for a long time.

Saddam’s regime finished as a “shari’a-lite” government, where hands were amputated for theft, prostitutes were beheaded in the street, and homosexuals executed. If shari’a is being applied as State policy, religious teachers and leaders acquire the positions of leadership over their communities, and the population is being indoctrinated with toxic religious and sectarian propaganda, what difference does is make if the senior leaders of Saddam’s regime actually believed it?

For what it is worth, the documents captured after the fall of the regime suggest Saddam had some kind of “born-again” experience: he thought the imposition of Islamic law and especially the mosque-building could absolve him in the eyes of god, which is why Saddam pressed on with the Islamization program even when it alienated sections of the party—including his own brother-in-law, Barzan Ibrahim.

Douri was also given the task of forming a State-supervised organized crime network, most importantly oil smugglers across the Syrian border, to evade the sanctions, which provided the resources for an internal patronage network, much of it centred on the mosques, that bound sections of the population, notably the Sunni Arabs, to the regime.

The Faith Campaign and Douri’s networks are the ideological and material structures that underpin ISIS at the present time.

The Post-Saddam Insurgency

The post-Saddam insurgency was composed of essentially three streams: FREs buttressed by the 100,000 criminals released by the regime in October 2002; the tribes who received direct patronage from the Saddam regime and the benefit of sanctions-busting smuggling operations; and foreign-led Salafi-jihadists. Douri was involved in all three.

At the fall of the regime, there were up to 95,000 FREs still in the field, which included: 26,000 Special Republican Guards, 30,000 Fedayeen Saddam, 31,000 officers, agents, and analysts of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), plus Ba’ath Party militiamen and officers from various other formations. PROJECT 111 in late 2002 trained a special cadre of 1,000 Ba’athist intelligence officials in sabotage and covert operations, and gave them specific instructions to reconnect with one-another and operate as a decentralized network to fight their way back to power in the event of the regime’s collapse.

It was “this disparate group of select Ba’ath Party operatives, security agents, officers in the elite military formations, Fedayeen Saddam members and a few tribal leaders, shored up by criminal elements that formed the nucleus of the insurgency,” Ali Allawi, who held several Ministerial positions in the post-Saddam government, has written.

There was nothing monolithic or hierarchical about the insurgency, but it was structurally built on an “emergency plan” put out by the Saddam regime in January 2003, and it did have a networked command structure and a resource stream that placed the balance of power, at least up to 2005, in the hands of the fallen regime’s leaders, specifically Douri and Muhammad Younis al-Ahmed who had fled to Syria.

Saddam’s doomsday directive had laid the groundwork for a decentralized but nonetheless interconnected insurgency. Saddam didn’t anticipate an invasion but instead Western bombing that might spark a repeat of the 1991 Shi’ite revolt, into which Iran would intrude. Saddam therefore concentrated regime resources on securing the border and distributing cash and weapons stocks, with sleeper cells (predominantly Fedayeen Saddam) throughout the south of the country to head off this possibility.

If, “God forbid[,] the Iraqi Command falls,” the directive said, then the local Ba’ath Party branches should destroy their offices and the records so intelligence agents and others could not be identified, disperse physically while remaining in contact, buy weapons from the black market, then conduct sabotage against public infrastructure and assassinations against potential senior leaders of a new political order, especially Shi’ite clerics.

There is no doubt that this infrastructure, plus the old regime’s looted resources, allowed Douri and al-Ahmed to guide the formation of the insurgency in the early days. No one group was strong enough to direct the insurgency, even highly-organized groups like then-al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM), now ISIS, which meant cooperation with and connections to the old regime were inevitable.

The amorphous shape of the insurgency at a local level means that neither the Douri/al-Ahmed sponsors nor the local recipients can be exactly sure who got donated resources. This fact is what makes it difficult nail down exactly which people and groups are precursors to ISIS. Insurgents’ contacts were much more based on personal connections and opportunism than strict principle. Even actual allegiances were fickle, especially among the tribes. This doesn’t mean the differences aren’t real: at the present time virtually all insurgents have been marginalized or annexed by ISIS, but no doubt beneath the carapace of terror and bribery the local, tribal, and factional/ideological differences remain. But it does show the complexity.

Rayburn has noted that there was “no secular Sunni resistance at all” in Iraq. This, too, was Douri’s doing. The Faith Campaign left Iraq with a much more religious, sectarian population—something that shocked the exiles. Douri and al-Ahmed concentrated their patronage on FREs, Ba’athist-Salafist groups like al-Hizb al-Awda (The Party of the Return), Jaysh al-Muhammad, and Jaysh al-Mujahideen, which was particularly dominated by Fedayeen Saddam (Saddam’s Men of Sacrifice), a militia set up in 1994 that was fanatically loyal to the regime, where the Ba’ath-Salafist fusion can be seen perfectly.

The Fedayeen’s primary task was to eliminate the regime’s internal enemies, but the Fedayeen also functioned as a mutaween (religious police) in Saddam’s final years—it was they who beheaded prostitutes in public squares and made crowds watch, very much in the spirit of ISIS. As Baram has elsewhere noted, this is no accident: “Many [Fedayeen] … fled to Syria, where they constituted the nucleus for the establishment of ISIS”.

Douri, however, exercised no fastidiousness in ensuring that funds and weapons stayed out of the hands of Salafi-jihadists; to the contrary. The FREs-al-Qaeda alliance that formed the insurgency started before the invasion. The Saddam regime had collaborated with al-Qaeda to help Ansar al-Islam wage war against the Kurds since the late 1990s. During the invasion Ansar fled to Iran with its by-then-leader Abu Musab az-Zarqawi. After the fall of Baghdad, Douri and the Ba’athist remnants would “help smuggle the [Ansar] fighters … to central Iraq so they can join the fight against U.S. forces.” By late 2003, Douri and his allies were helping Ansar al-Islam and the Salafi-jihadists “coordinate their attacks”.

With the connivance of the Assad regime, foreign Salafi-jihadists were arriving through Damascus International Airport to wage holy war against constitutional order in Iraq. The mosques infiltrated during the Faith Campaign were used to bring in fighters from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Africa, and the Sudan. Douri-sponsored insurgents collaborated enthusiastically with the holy warriors and “sub-contracted mass casualty attacks to Al Qaeda fighters”. Among the sanctions-busting rackets Douri had run was the importation of stolen cars from Europe via the Jordanian port of Aqaba; these cars were now put at the service of the suicide bombers.

The irony is that Douri is a Sufi of the Naqshbandi order, regarded by the Salafi-jihadists as heretical.

Alongside the Faith Campaign, Douri “fostered a fraternity of Sufi military and intelligence officers inside the Baathist regime,” explains Rayburn, centred on Douri’s Naqshbandis, which functioned as “a parallel network”—not unlike a Freemason-style secret society. This Sufi society went somewhat dormant at the fall of the regime and Douri instead patronized other regime remnants and Salafi-jihadists who would frustrate the American project for constitutional government in Mesopotamia.

Douri’s primary job for decades had been keeping Saddam in power, and even in exile Douri didn’t want to overshadow his former boss. Only after Saddam went to the gallows in December 2006 would Douri claim a public role as leader of the Ba’ath Party and reactivate this Sufi network, which became Jaysh Rijal at-Ṭariqa an-Naqshabandiya (JRTN).

JRTN drew from the Naqshbandi Order and was distinctly Islamist in ideology. Though Sufism is commonly regarded as a more contemplative, peaceful form of the faith, it has a history of religious militancy—it was, for example, Sufis who led the first major revolt against Atatürk’s secular reforms in Turkey in 1925. JRTN is run by FREs, and would become one of the most powerful Iraqi insurgent groups.

Given Douri’s age (he was born in 1942) and health (he has apparently had leukaemia for nearly two decades), it is doubtful he could lead a military campaign. But Douri “tend[ed] to the coalition,” as Michael Knights puts it, of tribes and mid-level military men (these being the professionals) that make up JRTN, a job Douri’s long role in the Ba’ath regime and personality made him ideal for.

The Awakening

The tribes of western Iraq deeply resented their loss of income as the Coalition cracked down on the smuggling networks across the Syrian border, and in combination with the loss of prestige, U.S. cultural missteps, and the growing recognition of Iranian power in Baghdad “under the nose” of the Coalition, the tribes came to see AQM/ISIS, as an ally in restoration.

The local insurgents were initially dominant over the Qaeda elements in Iraq, but by the end of 2005, “the guest-worker insurgents,” as Rayburn brilliantly puts it, were overwhelming the local insurgency; empowered by their Levantine networks inside Iraq, AQM/ISIS was even powerful enough in 2005-07 to spill out from Iraq to Jordan and Lebanon.

Sunni revanchism had motivated the locals: Lana al-hukum; wa lakum al-latum (for us political power; for you self-flagellation) was the Sunni supremacist refrain to the Shi’a. The fallen dictatorship and its tribal clientele saw the holy warriors as an ally in getting rid of the Americans so they could take the country back from the Shi’a and the Kurds. Zarqawi had a rather larger strategic picture in mind.

Zarqawi wanted to start a grand religious war, which would have the Shi’ites “bear their inner vengeance” and “awaken the sleepy Sunnis” by making the Sunnis “fearful of destruction and death,” at which point Zarqawi could pose as their last line of defence—a strategy pursued by Iran in reverse, which has included helping the Zarqawi’ists at times. This clear alliance of interests between the Zarqawi’ists and Iran convinced some Sunni insurgents, already mired in conspiracy theories, that AQM/ISIS was really an Iranian puppet.

Getting the Americans out of Baghdad and keeping the Shi’ites from having political power proved not to be enough common ground between the Sunni insurgents and the takfiris: the Sunnis wearied of the imposition by foreigners, and signs of the Sahwa (Awakening) were appearing by the summer of 2005, though they were not self-sustaining and needed the Surge to succeed.

With the creation of the Anbar Salvation Council, led by Abd al-Sattar al-Rishawi (Abu Risha), in September 2006, the Sahwa had begun in earnest. The Surge began in January 2007.

The most serious rift opened in the Iraqi insurgency in April 2007: AQM/ISIS killed thirty members of the Islamic Army of Iraq (IAI), the largest Ba’athist-Salafist insurgent group, and IAI publicly appealed for Osama bin Laden to get a grip of his wayward affiliate. Even the “formal” Ba’athists began to take their distance from AQM/ISIS. It was announced in August 2007 that Douri had “decided to sever ties with al-Qaeda” in favour of a program of “national resistance”.

By late 2007, most Iraqi Sunni Arabs were done with the foreign-led Salafi-jihadists of AQM/ISIS. There were now splits among the Ba’athist-Salafist and Iraqi Salafist insurgents on the question of whether to accommodate to the new order by joining the Sahwa and government institutions, or continuing the struggle to overturn the post-2003 order on an Islamist-nationalist basis; the Iraqi rejectionists would over time be gathered under JRTN’s banner. JRTN was “the only Iraqi insurgent group to have grown stronger during and since the U.S.-led ‘surge’,” according to Knights.

After the Surge

The major effect of the Surge, because it so severely weakened the insurgency, was that by 2009 it forced the disparate rejectionists to combine into two broad coalitions, namely JRTN and ISIS. JRTN was the stronger, ISIS then being at its absolute nadir. There was an ideological divide between JRTN and ISIS and an organizational division, but cooperation became unavoidable.

JRTN shifted to a consistent public posture of only opposing “occupiers”—the U.S. and (supposedly) the Kurds in Ninawa and Kirkuk, and Iran in Baghdad. JRTN had access to funds from former Republican Guard officers (mostly in Jordan) and rents exacted as “taxes” from the Sunni communities in the Tigris Valley with which it was deeply interwoven. Indeed Douri’s rent-seeking networks—especially agriculture and black market—gave Douri strength not only in Iraq but allowed Douri to resist an attempt by Assad to supplant him with al-Ahmed, who fell under Damascus’ sway.

This funding and local connectedness allowed JRTN to intimidate judges, penetrate the Iraqi security forces, and call on tribal support. Because of JRTN’s (ostensible) focus on foreigners, it went unimpeded even by Sunnis who had ceased “resistance”. To maintain this image, JRTN would use AQM/ISIS to carry out mass-casualty attacks on Iraqi civilians, to eliminate or intimidate rivals. Douri’s web of contacts allowed this “blurring of the organization,” which meant that often the executors of attacks were unaware of who actually ordered the hit.

Douri’s death is potentially important because it would remove a major node in coordinating the disparate elements of JRTN.

Zarqawi’s Egyptian successor Abu Ayyub al-Masri was killed in April 2010, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took over ISIS. Many FREs (whom Douri had helped Salafize) would now rise to dominance within ISIS. ISIS had been moving toward Iraqization since at least 2006, with the founding of the Mujahideen Shura Council by Zarqawi, which would become the Islamic State of Iraq later that year; this process would be completed in 2010-11.

The MSC had joined the foreign-led AQM to Iraqi Salafist insurgent groups dominated by FREs, and with ISIS’ devastation during the Surge—thirty-four of forty-two senior AQM/ISIS operatives had been removed by June 2010, and the foreign fighter flow had dried up—ISIS fell back on its most militarily capable members. No doubt some of the FREs who joined ISIS in 2006 gained advancement. But it is important to note that the most prominent FREs within ISIS since 2010 have been there since 2003-04, and had given up Ba’athism for a variant of Salafism long before that. There has been some recent commentary suggesting al-Baghdadi is merely a front-man for the FREs, and that the FREs are not really Islamists. Both claims fail to meet the timeline.

Al-Baghdadi might have appeared to come from nowhere, but he was actually rather well-known, both within ISIS and the intelligence services battling it, not least because he had been imprisoned at Camp Bucca between January and December 2004.

There is little doubt that al-Baghdadi emerged from the milieu of the Faith Campaign. The intriguing question is the personal relationship between al-Baghdadi and Douri.

Derek Harvey, America’s top intelligence analyst in figuring out the post-Saddam insurgency, says that “one of Baghdadi’s mentors at the University of Islamic Sciences was close to Izzat al-Douri.” And al-Baghdadi, who sought in his youth to pursue a career at Saddam’s Ministry of Islamic Endowments, is from Samarra, which was “very tight” with the Saddam regime, according to a U.S. military official. When al-Baghdadi attended the Islamic University of Baghdad it was at the height of Saddam’s Faith Campaign “when the Baath Party was controlling admissions”. The official added:

There’s no way you’d get vetted and approved by the party without having an extended family network of uncles and cousins and so on who are in the regime and endorsing you. … [A]l-Baghdadi may not have been a Baathist himself, but I guarantee you he had a lot of Baathist family members who put him into the Islamic University.

The exact extent of the relationship between al-Baghdadi and Douri might never be known, but there is reason to think it is closer than would be flattering to the self-styled “caliph” who rejects the ex-Ba’athists as socialist infidels.

After the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, JRTN continued attacks against the Iraqi government and continued tactical cooperation with ISIS. But as ISIS strengthened, with the removal of the common (American) foe, the tenuous Salafist-Sufist entente frayed.

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s consolidation of a sectarian autocracy that was dependent on Iran is the major factor in pushing the Sunnis into accepting ISIS back as a bulwark against Baghdad. But JRTN in the earlier period, and ISIS by the summer of 2012 with Operations BREAKING THE WALLS and SOLDIERS’ HARVEST (which also freed ISIS members from prison), helped stroke the Shi’a-led government’s overreaction precisely in order to foster a sense of persecution among the Sunnis to which the insurgents could claim to be the answer. ISIS especially also continued an assassination campaign against the Sahwa leaders at the same time Baghdad was witch-hunting the Sahwa out of the government and refusing to supply them with the means of defending themselves, leading to destabilization and a security vacuum in the Sunni areas of northern Iraq that ISIS would fill.

Maliki responded violently to the Sunni protest movement that began in December 2012, and by December 2013 it boiled over into a full-scale Sunni uprising. Fallujah slipped from government control in January 2014. Initially, Douri-aligned insurgents held Fallujah; it was only in June 2014 that ISIS would take over. Mutatis mutandis, this pattern was repeated in many places across Iraq. ISIS would cooperate with Iraqi Sunni insurgents, including JRTN, in the first half of 2014—at the time ISIS was forming a “shadow authority” in Mosul—and ISIS’ invasion of Iraq from Syria could not have happened without JRTN’s help.

ISIS’ drive for monopolistic control, however, led to arrests and executions of JRTN soon after ISIS invaded Iraq, and then again more recently. ISIS’ consolidation of control in Iraq has quite deliberately come at JRTN’s expense, with ISIS moving into areas of Mosul like Tarmooz 19 that are known Ba’athist strongholds, to eliminate potential enemies.

JRTN had tried since at least the time of the U.S. withdrawal to refashion itself as a cross-sectarian nationalist movement. The JRTN spokesman who denied that Douri had been killed, for instance, is a Shi’a named Khudayr al-Murshidi. JRTN has tried outreach to the Kurds (much less successfully than ISIS, it should be noted.) Thus JRTN had some criticisms of ISIS’ persecution of minorities, but these were kept somewhat oblique, even in the early months of this year. But by May, JRTN started naming ISIS in their critiques, and JRTN’s break with ISIS now seems to be complete. It is too late for JRTN, however.

JRTN’s final play to rescue itself after ISIS’ invasion of Iraq last summer was, seemingly, outreach to the Arab States, especially Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to convince them that JRTN was the anti-ISIS, anti-Iran force we’ve all been waiting for in Iraq. JRTN paid tribute to the deceased Saudi monarch and supported the Saudi-led operation against the Houthis in Yemen. JRTN condemned the burning to death of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh by ISIS as a “despicable crime” against “the brother Jordan”. Jordan has long been a hotbed of popular agitation against the New Iraq, and the Hashemite monarchy has openly hosted members of the Iraqi insurgency, including as recently as last October, when the IAI attended a conference in Amman.

Whether JRTN was trying to leverage itself into the National Guard, the proposed force to replace the Sahwa militias, or not is a moot point: Aymenn al-Tamimi has argued persuasively that JRTN has “become totally marginalised,” and Douri and the other senior war criminals of the Saddam regime were no kind of answer to the dual problems of ISIS and Iran in Iraq.

Conclusion

As Iran conquers Iraq, enabled by President Obama’s attempted détente with Iran, ISIS has dismantled its main Sunni insurgent rivals and the remainder have closed ranks around ISIS as the vanguard of Sunni revanchism. The Sunnis and the ex-Saddamists have not given up on their former dominion. That the rallying-cry for this attempted restoration is Islam is no surprise. Ba’athism was a spent ideology and, thanks in no small part to Douri, the Iraqi population is now much more sectarian and religiously militant, and less responsive to an appeal in secular-nationalist terms.

There is a question remaining over what would happen if ISIS took Baghdad. Harvey, for example, thinks the conversion of the ex-Saddamists to Islamism is real enough, and some kind of shari’a regime would be the result of an ISIS victory in Iraq. Another view is given by Michael Pregent, a former U.S. military intelligence officer who worked with Harvey, who says that the Islamism is a marketing scheme: the FREs converting to Islamism would be “like saying that every Army Ranger or Special Forces soldier suddenly became a Branch Davidian.” As ISIS approaches Baghdad, the Iraqi Sunni chauvinists are certainly strengthened against the takfiris—the prospect of a Sunni restoration has appeal well outside Salafist circles among Iraqi Sunnis—but there is reason to wonder if the nationalists could off-ramp the takfiris at this point.

Many actors have influenced and manipulated ISIS’ rise. Iran has played a nefarious role from ISIS’ beginnings. The Assad regime was determined to make ISIS the face of the rebellion, and Iran has done its utmost to help that project. The U.S. disbanding Saddam’s army put military-intelligence professionals at the service of the insurgency who might otherwise have joined the New Iraq. ISIS’ revival in the wake of the Surge has been enabled by the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and refusal to intervene in Syria in 2011 or 2012, which gave ISIS the time and space it needed to establish the beachhead from which it could invade Iraq.

Still, ISIS needed help after the Surge to survive and found it in Douri. Moreover, the actions of the Saddam regime—with Douri as its prime mover—had ensured that something like ISIS was coming as a successor force in Iraq no matter what. ISIS’ turning on Douri is little surprise—the Sufi Douri was playing with fire all along—and it doesn’t change what Douri did to condition the rise of ISIS. In light of this, ISIS can be regarded as the afterlife of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Kyle Orton is a Middle East analyst and blogger. Follow him on Twitter @KyleWorton

The post Izzat ad Douri and ISIS appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

10 Reasons Why Iraq Is The Worst Place On Earth

If you’ve been alive for more than a day, you will know that Iraq is a dangerous place, where suicide attacks are a daily occurrence, women are oppressed, and people don’t have a social life. A guy I know moved to Iraq four months ago, and wanted to share his experience of life in Baghdad (the Capital City) and has set out to prove why Iraq really is the worst place on earth.

1. Suicide attacks are daily occurrence

People live a peaceful life. Baghdad is not a battlefield and rockets do not fall over your head.

Chances of you dying while driving in Baghdad are higher than getting shot at.

2. Iraqi women are oppressed

25% of seats in national parliaments are held by women.

Zaha Mohammad Hadid, is an Iraqi architect. She received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004—the first woman to do so and the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011.

3. It’s a plain desert

This photo would disagree!

and so would this one…

4. The people are violent.

We spotted two lovers on a Ferris Wheel in Baghdad.

Streets across Baghdad have been lined with stalls selling heart-shaped balloons and huge red teddy bears for Valentines Day.

5. There’s nothing to do for fun

An employee at Baghdad’s Alwiyah Club called out the winners of a bingo game.

Young thrill seekers don wet suits and get ready to jet ski on the Tigris River.

6. It has no historical heritage

Babylon’s Hanging Gardens were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

7. It’s a poor country

Oil reserves in Iraq are considered the world’s fifth-largest proven oil reserves, with 140 billion barrels.

8. TV and Music are banned

Equivalent of American Idol called Arab Idol – the most popular show in the country.

There are about 20 TV channels and more than 25 radio stations in the country.

9. It is a war-torn country

Not really!

I would have to disagree again.

10. Iraqis are against democracy

This photo says, No, they are not!

This is how Iraq has been for years, everyone living side by side.

The post 10 Reasons Why Iraq Is The Worst Place On Earth appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

Don’t Give Up On Iraq

Iraq has been fighting the Islamic State (Daesh, ISIS) terror gang for well over a year now. Daesh’s blitz across Northern Iraq and its more recent advances in Iraq’s Anbar Province have led many to quite cynical conclusions. And to date Iraq’s efforts against Daesh have yielded few notable successes. This has led some to conclude that Iraq might as well be partitioned in the long-run since it cannot effectively function as a multi-denominational and multi-ethnic nation-state.

Yes things have looked extremely discouraging over the course of the past year. Especially in light of the Iraqi Army’s failure to prevent Daesh from overrunning Ramadi last month nearly a year after its monumental failure to defend Mosul and other large swaths of Northern Iraq in the summer of 2014. But to readily conclude that Iraq is finished, that Iraq is dead, at this point in time may be a premature judgement to make.

Indeed it is somewhat fashionable to say, especially in light of Daesh’s symbolic dismantlement of the Sykes-Picot Syria-Iraq border, that Iraq is a mere construct imposed by British imperialists – lines drawn on the map with little understanding of the intricacies which exist on the ground those boundaries were arbitrarily planted. Which is the case, as is the case with so are many other nation states. And if this war does lead to ultimately greater autonomy and less centralization for the nation as a whole that will be a success, not a failure.

I sometimes wonder if minute-by-minute news updates and detailed up-to-date accounts of situations across the world have led us to lose our sense of historical perspective. On what basis can we, or are some, arguing that Iraq has now failed as a nation, that it has no future? Because it has failed to completely defeat and completely setback a threat to its existence within the space of a year?

Think about it. What major conflict or war was definitively ended within the space of a year? Should one have, for example, have concluded that …

… early on in the American Civil War that because the Union had not thoroughly defeated the Confederacy in less than two years that the war was hopelessly lost and that the Union should have agreed to a partition of the United States rather than continue fighting?

… the fact the North Vietnamese had failed to wear down the Americans to the point of withdrawing from Vietnam by the end of the 1960’s was evidence that they would never prevail in that war and therefore should have unilaterally disbanded, surrendered or given up accordingly?

… the failure of the Iranians to repel fully the invading Iraqis from Iran’s western Khuzestan province by early 1982 (the Iraqi invasion begun in September 1980 and was eventually repelled in May 1982) showed they possessed “no will to fight” and that Iran should have accepted a compromise over that territory?

Don’t forget that since those humiliating aforementioned setbacks in Nineveh and Anbar we’re now seeing Iraqis fighting in tandem under the banner of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU’s). Not only are Shi’ite militias entering a Sunni-majority province but they are doing so in coordination with local Sunni tribesmen in order to recuperate Anbar from Daesh. Meaning the PMU’s are now, by all means, a combined citizen Sunni-Shiite fighting force. If they succeed in this effort they may even strengthen post-Daesh Iraq despite the many differences amongst Iraqis and fissures in the society which were exacerbated, with violent consequences, throughout the course of the Iraq War.

Iraq is fighting to overcome this crisis and eradicate this violent threat to its very existence. Look at the efforts being made by Iraqis of various different backgrounds. They are quite commendable and give one quite a bit of hope for Iraq and its future. Not cynicism. After all this is a country which hasn’t had a very strong central authority nor government since the regime change of 2003 and the lengthy Iraq War which followed. Nevertheless since the onset of this crisis national unity has been trumpeted by government and clerical (most notably the pre-eminent Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — who has been commendably sober-minded and thoughtful when it comes to devising thoughtful proposals to help solve this crisis) officials.

People who argue that Iraq has ceased to exist and that a partition is inevitable seem to also believe that a partition will resolve a lot of the mess in Iraq. It is of course not, the history of partitions indicates that a partition of Iraq (which will likely be, at least, a three-way partition) may ultimately be quite violent as opposed to a simple bloodless solution to its present woes. There are no simple solutions to this crisis. But that’s not the same as saying that a solution which keeps Iraq intact as a nation is not feasible. On the contrary.

Issues such as Kirkuk are going to be issues of contention and/or conflict regardless of whether or not Iraq officially breaks-up. The future, or lack thereof, of Iraq is going to be determined by developments in Anbar and Nineveh respectively. In Anbar Baghdad has to coordinate formerly disparate Shia and Sunni groups against a common foe. In Nineveh smaller minority groups will have to work in tandem to liberate Mosul, the crown jewel of Daesh’s so-called caliphate to date. That operation will likely have to encompass Kurdish forces (who have had many tactical successes against Daesh in Northern Iraq but are holding out on any attempt to liberate Mosul for the time being since going it alone would be too risky for them at this point in time), Sunni Arabs who have had to leave Mosul and wish to liberate their homes, and other smaller minorities in that part of Iraq.

The next few months will be very telling whereby Iraq’s future is concerned. There have been discouraging setbacks. There may even be some more. But there are also many encouraging signs that Iraq will indeed be able to weather the storm. And if these delicate efforts do succeed this whole crisis will likely strengthen the Iraqi nation as a whole.

The post Don’t Give Up On Iraq appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

#TerroristTurkey becomes Number 1 worldwide HashTag

News broke overnight that ISIS aka Daesh had attacked the city of Kobane by crossing over the border from Turkey.

Naturally the global community on Twitter erupted at the news of Turkey allowing ISIS to freely move across the border to launch an attack on the vulnerable city of Kobane.

there is only 1 country in the whole middle east that daesh never attacked despite bordering it: #TerroristTurkey

— Cahit Storm (@cahitstorm) June 25, 2015

For too long Turkey has been the ally in the region not assisting with the fight back against ISIS. Finally, after seeing ISIS attack Kobane by coming across the border….. enough is enough! On one hand Turkey is a member state of NATO but on the other because Turkey is so desperate to see President Bashar al-Assad removed from power, Turkey is willing to support anything that could possibly see Turkey removed.

Killing children in the name of the caliphate… And turkey support them. #TerroristTurkey #isis #twitterkurds http://pic.twitter.com/1pvX2Aq5OS

— Heval Soro (@Firyayek) June 25, 2015

Sadly…. this is the Turkey we are dealing with today.

Sadly….. Turkey could and should be a key partner for us all in the region to fight back against ISIS.

Erdogan is running a whole country as a giant racist & sectarian terror organisation. World should start pressuring him! #TerroristTurkey

— Gilgamesh (@k4veh) June 25, 2015

Why doesn’t Turkey want to reject ISIS? Why is Turkey the single country in the region that is not attacked? Too many questions that remain unanswered and finally enough is enough and #TerroristTurkey has become the Number 1 tweeted hashtag on Twitter. Quite remarkable.

Hashtag #terroristturkey, by those who blame Turkey for facilitating ISIS attacks on Kobani, is trending globally. http://pic.twitter.com/TaJFyWiFCT

— DavidKenner (@DavidKenner) June 25, 2015

What needs to happen from this moment on is the US and the Europeans to start asking serious questions of Turkey and conclude whether Turkey is a partner or not!

The post #TerroristTurkey becomes Number 1 worldwide HashTag appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

Iraqi Telecom provider Asiacell is having a surge in subscribers

The leading telecoms provider, Asiacell is currently experience a surge in demand thanks to a significant investment made in 2014 in conjunction with Swedish telecom giant Ericsson.

By working with Ericcson, the company has been able to deliver a much more higher-end broadband service that many come to expect when paying for Mobile Telecommunications.

The key to this upgrade was the installation of the Ericsson RBS 6000 radio base station, which enables an 80% lower energy consumption per subscriber and also requires 75% less space compared to previous base stations meaning Asiacell is able to save on fees associated with leasing the land.

Asiacell listed on the Iraqi Stock Exchange in 2013, listing as the largest IPO in the Middle East since 2008. Trading begun after the successful telecoms company raised some $1.3 Billion.

More than anything the listing ensured more eyes were drawn to the market and speculators are currently awaiting the listing of telecom rival Zain Iraq.

What makes the Zain Iraq IPO interesting is that they have been delaying their listing since August 2011 and in the process incurring fines. The three mobile networks were required to float onto the Iraqi Stock Exchange as part of their 15 year licenses that were awarded back in 2007.

As the region develops its infrastructure, Iraq is keen to ensure it is not left behind.

The post Iraqi Telecom provider Asiacell is having a surge in subscribers appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

Iraq’s Reckoning with Daesh

In scenes uncannily like Eastern Europe in the early 1940’s or Srebrenica in 1995 the victims of the Camp Speicher massacre of July 2014 were lined up like lambs to the slaughter. Unarmed and completely defenseless they were ruthlessly slaughtered by their captors. Up to 1,700 Iraqi air cadets were believed to have been murdered in Tikrit by Islamic State (Daesh, ISIS). Their bodies were either dumped into mass-graves near the scene of the massacre (the sight of freshly dug mass graves in Iraq is such a grotesque sight to behold isn’t it?) or the Tigris River. The murder-victims were primarily Shi’ites Muslims who are considered unforgivably heretical in Daesh’s eyes and thus deserving of such a slaughter.

When Shia militiamen fought against Daesh in Tikrit in April of this year they didn’t take any prisoners. This fact has been pointed out by journalists and commentators alike. And its quite significant. Most conclude that the reason there were no prisoners of war was simply because the Shia militiamen killed them all, regardless of whether or not they waved the white flag – remember plenty of Daesh members have surrendered and been taken as prisoners of war by the Kurds throughout the past year so it’s not as if they all manage to keep fighting on until they are killed. It has been argued that this take no prisoners strategy sets a very dangerous precedent for this conflict. After all, the general argument goes, if Daesh members know there is no choice but to fight to the death this war may be, perhaps needlessly, prolonged and therefore cause more death and destruction.

However there is another way to look at all this, and that is to view it is a conscious reckoning. The fact that no prisoners are being taken is the Shia militia’s way of conveying a very simple message. This fight is a fight to the bitter and bloody end. Daesh’s assault on Iraq is a fundamental assault on its existence and therefore must be completely eradicated. An absolute revenge, if you will, for the grave crime against humanity conducted at Camp Speicher (a massacre which was, it’s important to understand, a much graver massacre and crime than even the Dujail village massacre of Shiite men and boys ordered by Saddam Hussein in 1982 – the very massacre for which he was hanged in 2006). And yes that means this war may be much more brutal, much more bloody and much more violent than it otherwise might be. But as far as many of these Shia militiamen, and other Iraqis, are concerned this is the way it has to be since a defeat in the field of battle isn’t enough, Daesh must be completely purged, destroyed, never to rise or threaten Iraq and its people again for what it has done and for what it earnestly seeks to do.

Speicher needs to be put into perspective to properly understand this mentality. Cast your mind back to 1991 when the United States was readying to militarily confront Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, over its annexation of Kuwait. The now passed Tariq Aziz, then Iraq’s foreign minister, was told to convey to his president a warning given to him in a letter by then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker warning Iraq against using non-conventional biological or chemical weapons. Part of the letter declared that,

“If the conflict starts, God forbid, and chemical or biological weapons are used against our forces, the American people would demand revenge, and we have the means to implement this. This is not a threat, but a pledge that if there is any use of such weapons, our objective would not only be the liberation of Kuwait, but also the toppling of the present regime.”

Baker also spoke of “a most terrible response” against Iraq were it to deploy such weapons, indicating that the U.S. would retaliate in kind with non-conventional, possibly nuclear, weaponry. It was clear Saddam would have been completely obliterated if he were to attack American soldiers in such a way. Remember, one of the reasons Hussein was so confident he could keep Kuwait despite the technological superiority of the American-led multinational coalition was the fact that he perceived America to be a society which could not endure/tolerate the loss of ten-thousand soldiers in battle. He even once suggested to his military commanders that they could capture thousands of American soldiers (somehow), tie them to the front of Iraqi tanks and then seize parts of eastern Saudi Arabia to prevent any American attempt to retake Kuwait. Using American soldiers as human shields in such a manner would doubtlessly have incurred a devastating, to put it mildly, retaliation on Iraq which could well have been nuclear and killed many civilians and soldiers alike.

While these examples are hypothetical one can be almost certain if a tyrant like Saddam Hussein or a tyrannical group like Daesh ever did to unarmed American prisoners-of-war what Daesh has done to primarily Shi’ite Arab Iraqi cadets at Speicher the retaliation would be highly destructive and probably wouldn’t leave all an abundance of combatants alive to take prisoner. One should keep that in mind when trying to comprehend and understand what motivates and drives many of these Shia militiamen when it comes to some of the more ruthless actions they are undertaking against their irrevocable Daesh adversary.

The post Iraq’s Reckoning with Daesh appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

From Kirkuk to Tal Abyad

The Exhumation of Speicher: A Stark Reminder of Iraq’s Dark Past

Clear, Hold and Build: An Old Strategy With Dubious Prospects

Why It’s A Good Thing Tariq Aziz Was Not Executed

Iraq’s Shia Militias: A Solution to ISIS Much Better Than Stalemate

Forget 2003: U.S. presence in Iraq today is more like it was in 1996

Conspiracy theories which help Daesh

What’s Next for Anbar?

From Palmyra to Ramadi

“The youngest was a baby, maybe two months old.” -Eda Said

Fears and Hopes in the Kurdistan’s

Kofi Annan on Iraq

A Bill That Could Break Iraq

What’s At Stake in Iraq

The scourge of unadulterated fascism has once again ravaged Iraq and ruined the lives of countless numbers of innocents. The fusion of cunning Baathist tyranny and Islamist terror has seen a formidable standing enemy in the way of any chance of Iraq becoming a successful multi-denominational polity. Instead those who wish to subjugate Iraqis under the yoke of fascism are out in force in the form of Islamic State (Daesh). Everyone has seen how much they love to broadcast, and in the process document, their grotesque crimes against humanity.

The remnants of the Iraqi Baath Party helped Daesh perpetrate these crimes against the Iraqi people. Their collusion was a result of their mutual disdain over the prospect of an emerging Iraq which is not dominated by a small Sunni clique. Their murderous exploits against Iraq’s Kurds, Shia and Sunnis alike show their desire to terrorize Iraqis and re-subjugate them under an order maintained through coercion, fear and violence.

The Camp Speicher massacre of last summer (and atrocities leveled against communities in Northern Iraq) reminds one of the dark days of Saddam Hussein’s reign. That incident saw mostly Shi’ite prisoners of war being lined up and systematically shot in the head and then dumped into mass graves in scenes reminiscent of infamous Nazi atrocities in the Second World War. Few things are more heartbreaking than seeing fresh mass graves being sown into the earth of Iraq by the forces of Islamist reaction working in tandem with those very Baathists who butchered and subdued Iraq’s Shia Arabs and who bulldozed whole Kurdish communities and gassed and murdered Kurds in the tens-of-thousands.

Amidst these horrors however are the things that make Iraq worth fighting for. The Iraqi government is striving to be a more inclusive institution and the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq is promulgating level-headed secular attitudes in order not to give Daesh and their Baathists backers the pleasure of seeing exacerbated sectarian fissures plunge Iraq into more bloodletting and violence. A state-of-affairs which, for obvious reasons, would benefit those who want Iraq to fail. Because, remember, Iraq has to be an abject failure, and the majority of its people ruthlessly subjugated, for them to succeed in their endeavours.

Which is one of many reasons one welcomes their defeat and their failure. Not only because they are vicious tyrants but because they stand in the way of a very real opportunity for Iraq to reach its very real potential, and in the process thrive to the benefit of both its people and the wider world.

Iraq Newsletter

Want to read more articles like this?

* We will send you an email as soon as we publish the next article!

The post What’s At Stake in Iraq appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

The Real Life Stories of People Living In Iraq Today!

From time to time we come across a story that shocks us to the core, those videos of people having their heads chopped off. Those videos of people being thrown off of the top of the tallest building in Mosul for the accusation of being Gay.

Life was always tough for Iraqi’s especially the last 13 or so years. The tough times show little sign of easing, at least not any time in the immediate future. All we can do is have hope, if we lose hope we lose everything.

I have been following this Non-Profit organisation for sometime and wanted to share with you some of their stories.

Organisation: Because, I Love Peace

Key Leader: Dr. Sarah AK Ahmed with the support of Canon Andrew White (aka Vicar of Baghdad)

Website: She has a website but it wouldn’t do justice if I gave the link to it since it is not updated often. The updates are regular on her Facebook page: http://ift.tt/1DL1kHn

With that, I would like to share three short REAL LIFE STORIES of three REAL PEOPLE living the REALITY of our 2015 IRAQ.

Story 1 – Because, I Love Peace

At Baharka Camp in Erbil love stories always breaks my heart. Abdulla is one of many that ISIS managed to get to his heart in a certain way. Today in our visit Abdulla came and shared his story with the team. Thanks Christian for putting it into words. “Abdullah was engaged to be married to the love of his life. A Mechanic in Mosul, he was saving up to move with his future bride and start a family. During the invasion of Mosul, they were separated. After being beaten bloody, he returned to consciousness only to see his fiancé being dragged away, her fingers broken and ankles crushed. He has been looking for her since. Nearly 8 months have passed and he has yet to hear of her death or release. While he searches, he takes time during the day to assist with deliveries of flour and medical supplies to refugee camps. When asked if he thinks he will ever find her, he states, “She is my life. If I stop looking I will die”, he then returns to loading food onto his truck for the others who have lost everything.” Christian Stephen

Story 2 – Because, I Love Peace

Luai is one of the most helpful people I have meet in one of the Christian Centers on the boarder of Erbil. He lives in this compound where the church is paying the rent of 45 houses for around 220 families to live in. We went yesterday and he wanted to share his story to our team. And it was heart breaking. “Luai was forced out of Mosul by ISIS before he could reach his family. His Aunt, who he describes as “my heart”, was taken before he could rescue her. At 62 years of age, she was taken to the ISIS camp and forced to “Marry” the fighters. ISIS militants believe that if they marry a woman before having sex, it is blessed in their gods eyes. She was “married” over 250 times, every 2 hours, with each “Marriage” resulting in brutal injuries. She was eventually released after 3 months of hourly rapes. The reason for her release was, according to the note, that she had lost her mind and was no longer of desire to the fighters. Upon her return, she had no papers, could barely walk, refused to speak as well as having violent traumatic flashbacks. Luai did all he could to bring “his heart” back to health, but she was lost… When asked what he feels, Luai begins to gently shake with rage and tears rim his eyelids. He simply states, “When I find them, I will destroy them. I will drink of their blood.” Christian Stephen

Story 3 – Because, I Love Peace

“Saddam was part of the Iraqi army in Mosul when ISIS took over. His two sons were at home while he was fighting. ISIS came to the house and took the two boys. They took the youngest boy and shot him in the head, heart and knees with a pistol as his brother was forced to watch. When Saddam returned to his family, his son was dead and buried in the neighbours bathroom under a makeshift grave. Here, he holds his only surviving son. The surviving son remembers nothing of the event except for the sound of the air releasing from his little brothers body when the bullets hit. Saddam has vowed to kill every last ISIS fighter until either they are all dead, or he is.” Christian Stephen Thank you Christian and Dylan for coming along with me to Erbil to report on all that I have to deal with here, and to make those people heard.

Iraq Newsletter

Want to read more articles like this?

* We will send you an email as soon as we publish the next article!

The post The Real Life Stories of People Living In Iraq Today! appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

On Baathist-Islamist Collusion

The poisonous legacy of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri

Evaluating Iran’s Influence in Iraq

Tanzania and Vietnam in 1979, Iraq in 2015

In the war against the infamously notorious Islamic State (referred to herein by the Arab acronym Daesh) we are seeing what many are concluding is the collapse of the Sykes-Picot order. Daesh’s men now walk over the border which used to separate the polities of Iraq and Syria with complete impunity. It’s going to be hard work protecting that border even if Daesh are successfully pushed from all of Iraq.

One has wondered since Mosul fell last June whether or not the Iraqi armed forces – and the increasingly more powerful militias fighting alongside it – can effectively guard Iraq’s border with Syria considering how porous it is and how effective Daesh can be at hit-and-run attacks.

Without getting too far ahead of oneself, Mosul is after all still, unfortunately, under Daesh’s rule, will it eventually prove feasible for Iraq’s armed forces and/or the Shia militia’s to expand their anti-Daesh campaign into northeastern Syria?

Mosul will be a blow for Daesh if they lose it quickly militarily. And while it may be possible for them to attempt to make a deal with the Iraqis by withdrawing unilaterally, in order to fortify their other positions in Syria, and suddenly reminding Baghdad that the border which it so gleefully dismantled is still a legal obstacle, of sorts, for it.

Okay it’s a doubtful scenario considering it would lose that group face in front of its members and supporters, many of whom are earnest Islamists who are traveling from afar to partake in what they see as a tremendously successful enterprise. Especially so soon after losing Tikrit. But even if they are forced from Mosul soon and back over that invisible line which demarcates the boundaries of Iraq and Syria it will take quite a large logistical effort to prevent that group from re-consolidating its control over the vast swaths of Syria it is still dominating (not to mention Iraq’s own Anbar province which will also take substantial political outreach, military, and militant, efforts to pry from Daesh’s grip over the coming weeks and months) from which to launch attacks against Iraqi and Kurdish targets. So perhaps an extended operation into Syrian territory controlled by Daesh to at least continue to pressure that group on the ground there may very well prove to be a necessity for Baghdad.

Yes in Syria there are the Syrian Kurds who have been very brave and valiant in their fight against Daesh. But the United States doesn’t completely trust them given their connections with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) group which it still holds to be a terrorist organization. And at a time when it is working closely with Turkey to train a new Syrian fighting force in exile, to uproot Daesh from northeast Syria, it is doubtful that their coordination with Syria’s Kurds will amount to anything more than giving them some air support when they can.

In other words there is no fighting force on the ground at present which can take the fight against Daesh to Raqqa. Don’t expect Turkey to do it, unless they are convinced that the U.S. is ready to start targeting the Syrian military and the regime of Bashar al-Assad as well. Also don’t expect this new Syrian fighting force (fittingly enough many detractors of this admittedly questionable strategy point out that after the Iraqi Army acquired billions in both training and hardware they crumbled immediately upon the onset of Daesh’s seizure of Mosul last June) to amount to anything substantial for at least another good year, or possibly even two.

We could possible even see a scenario unfold whereby Iraq, and/or these Shia Popular Mobilization Units, will at least contemplate intervening in Daesh-held Syrian territory to further weaken that group and hinder its ability to endanger Iraq and its people. It can legally do this under the United Nations Charter’s Article 51 given the fact that Syria’s territory is being, and has been, used by this group to attack Iraq.

Two mildly comparable historical precedents both emanate from the tumultuous years of 1978-79. During that period Tanzania invaded Uganda and brought an end to the brutal rule of the Idi Amin regime and Vietnam intervened militarily in Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge.

In both instances those respective states reasoned that it wasn’t feasible to merely try and secure or seal their frontiers but to actually transcend them and confront those regimes directly on their home turf. That’s not of course to say that both were necessarily success stories. Far from it, especially Vietnam’s intervention which quickly devolved into a decade-long occupation.

If the Iraqis are successful in their planned offensive to liberate Mosul, and re-consolidate their control over all of Nineveh, they may deem it fundamentally important to ensure Daesh is forcibly denied its haven in northeastern Syria.

The post Tanzania and Vietnam in 1979, Iraq in 2015 appeared first on Baghdad Invest.

Divide and Quit: Why an Iraqi carve-up may not be as clean-cut as it sounds

Daesh’s Downfall – Baghdad Invest

Reassessing the 1991 Iraqi Intifada 24 Years On

Restoration and Ruin in Iraq

Like father, like brother?—Jeb Bush and Iraq

Anbar and Sinai – Read about the similarities from Egypt to Iraq

Credit sale of weapons to Iraq, without interest

Iraq Should Not Forget How Sour Revenge Can Be

Iraqis should not let their, understandable, desire for revenge on the notorious Islamic State group (referred to herein as Daesh) cloud their judgement. If they do, even in defeat, Daesh may well prove to have dealt a fundamentally fatal blow to Iraq’s state and society.

In his 1945 essay ‘Revenge is Sour’ George Orwell recounts his time in Germany just after the fall of the Third Reich. He witnessed firsthand a young Viennese Jew overseeing a dozen or so S.S. officers who were of course by that time prisoners of war of the Allies. After all the things those brutes in the S.S. had done to Europe’s Jews and other minorities Orwell points out that he could hardly blame any Jew who would want to, say, at the very least jab or taunt those who had liquidated their families and friends. Orwell was quite skeptical about whether or not young Jews like the one he saw really enjoyed such little symbolic gestures of revenge. Rather, the famous writer contended, they told themselves they enjoyed it since they had longed for it all throughout the tyrannical reign of the Nazis when they were completely powerless. He very aptly summed up his observations as follows,

‘It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.’

I have been thinking about this old essay a lot lately given the present situation in Iraq. In light of some of the acts of sectarian violence committed by Shia militias in the war against Daesh there I find myself worrying that this will serve to exacerbate the underlying sectarian tensions in the country in the wake of the violence in the 2006-2008 period. I fear a potential scenario whereby the reforms in Baghdad either fail or turn out to be ultimately little more than superficial face-saving ones and that the Iraqi government’s only solution to defeating Daesh in Iraq is not a concerted effort aimed at helping the Sunnis rise up against their oppressors (never forget that the Sunni Arabs are as big a victim in all of this as the Sunni Kurds and the Shia Arabs) but instead a military campaign which will simply subdue them and their aspirations for more inclusivity in the country in the wake of the marginalization of many Sunni representatives in the political process during the tenure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. That would further divide and damage, and possibly even break-up for good, Iraq in the long-term. Which in turn would mean that even if Daesh is completely defeated militarily they will have been victorious when it comes to dividing, and perhaps ultimately destroying, Iraq since they will have served as the catalyst for wider sectarian violence. One hopes that governmental reforms are successful when it comes to defeating Daesh and consigning it into the long and painful annals of Iraq’s tumultuous history without the country becoming permanently fragmented.

Speaking of that long and painful history one finds oneself re-reading accounts and stories of mass-killings in Iraq in the not too distant past. The Al-Anfal campaign and the brute mass-murder of revolting Shia Arabs by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in March 1991 for example. The terror and destruction implemented by that man’s regime still makes one shudder when one reads the gruesome details. Arguably the best writer on the subject as it was unfolding was Kanan Makiya, his books Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence are well worth re-reading. Detailed in those books are the various atrocities, the cruelties and the horrors that regime afflicted on the Iraqi people. Yet when the man on top, the figurehead of all that cruelty and criminality, Saddam Hussein was finally executed on December 30 2006 Kanan Makiya called it “one of the worst days of my life” and “the antithesis of everything I had been working for and hoping for.”

Makiya contended that the limited nature of the tribunal to really get into the nit and grit of the regimes crimes against humanity made it by and large a failure. When Saddam finally went to the gallows, like so many of his victims, his executioners in Makiya’s words, “actually succeeded in making Saddam look good in the eyes of the Arab world.”

That’s quite an indictment from someone who spent a large part of his life scrupulously documenting the crimes of that man and hoping to one day see him face justice for his numerous crimes. Instead that ultimate revenge on behalf of so many Iraqis was stolen from them and that mass-murdering tyrant got to look like a victim in his final moments.

Since his rule was brought to an end by the Anglo-American invasion of 2003 the Shia of Iraq have largely been emancipated, as have the Kurds who already had, since 1991, some semblance of autonomy in the north of the country. Both these communities together make-up the majority of Iraq’s population. They now more-or-less stand on their own two feet, a far cry from those horrible days not too long ago when they were bludgeoned, brutalized and subjugated by the Baath. Some in the Shia community blamed their Sunni brethren for subjugating them back in the Saddam-era. However for the most part that community hasn’t sought petty vengeance, on the contrary, its preeminent Ayatollah, Ali Sistani, has been consistent in his denunciation of any infighting between the Sunnis and Shias quite rightfully pointing out that that is exactly what the likes of al-Qaeda and Daesh want them to do. And he is quite right. It’s no secret, nor surprise, that those Baathists who for so long regarded Iraqis over whom they ruled as their dispensable property have been cooperating with Daesh and have similar interests whereby sectarian subjugation is concerned.

In light of this one would impel the Iraqi state and society not to in fighting these thugs fall to their level. In their current capacity it is highly unlikely that they will be able to overrun either all of Iraq’s Kurdish region or the Shia south. It is therefore incumbent upon this government to live up to, and stand-by, its word that it will root out Daesh decisively from the Sunni-majority regions of Iraq they are hunkered down in by working with the provincial populations and tribes there. That way they will give Iraq a fighting chance to not only survive, but survive as a successful federal secular democracy and society which will not be dragged down and convulsed by the kind of destructive and divisive violence these vicious rampaging sectarians are earnestly seeking to bring about. If however the aforementioned outreach to the Sunnis isn’t wholeheartedly attempted the society could become fatally paralyzed by sectarian schisms, even if Daesh is defeated. And that will mean in defeat Daesh will still have succeeded in mortally wounding Iraq and bringing on many more years of sectarian bloodletting. Iraq and its people simply cannot afford to let that happen.

Iraq Newsletter

Want to read more articles like this?



* We will send you an email as soon as we publish the next article!

The post Iraq Should Not Forget How Sour Revenge Can Be appeared first on Baghdad Invest.