The film Vice, satirising the life and political career of George W Bush’s Vice-President Dick Cheney, has a short scene that neatly visualises the way in which the US invasion of Iraq turbo-charged Salafi Jihadism in the whole region. It shows Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi watching Colin Powell on television giving his famous speech to the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003 “justifying the invasion” and claiming that Iraq harboured a terrorist network linked to Al-Qaida that was controlled by Al-Zarqawi and that he had received hospital treatment in Baghdad.
While watching the TV, Al-Zarqawi’s expression changes from initial disbelief and astonishment to the dawning of a recognition of the huge opportunity Powell had given him by the name-check in New York.
In fact, Al-Zarqawi was not in Iraq until around the time the US invasion started and had spent a good part of 2002 in eastern Syria training his own group of fighters to organise a series of attacks in his native Jordan. This group seems to have been involved in the killing of Laurence Foley, a senior USAID administrator in Amman, in October 2002.
Four months later, his focus had shifted almost entirely to Iraq where, following a meeting with Al-Qaida military chief Said Adel, he became heavily involved in the smuggling of foreign fighters into Syria to join the armed resistance to the US invasion. It is hard to imagine that this change of focus was not in part brought about by Colin Powell accusing him on the international stage.
This small story illustrates two big themes about how the US invasion of Iraq impacted Syria that I will explore in this article.
First, there is the way in which, in their attempts to justify the invasion, the US promoted the false idea that there was a link between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The point of Powell raising Al-Zarqawi in the Security Council was to make the case that Al-Qaida was somehow linked to the Baghdad regime.
The tragic result was to inadvertently ignite Salafi jihadist resistance in Iraq and Syria. The mistake was then compounded by further US mistakes after the invasion that led to the emergence of Frankenstein’s monster of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Second, it is significant that when requests were made for the extradition of Al Zarqawi from Syria following the assassination of Foley in Amman, Bashar Al-Assad’s government ignored them. Why was a government that was no historic friend of its fellow Baathists in Iraq and certainly hostile to Islamist terrorism willing to turn a blind eye to the development of terrorist cells within its borders?
The answer also lies in the development of the US justifications of the invasion of Iraq, including the ‘axis of evil’ speech by President Bush five months after the 9/11 attacks, which started the public pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Development of ISIS
In the autumn of 2015, John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov convened two meetings of foreign ministers from the entire region together with the European Union and China in the Sacher hotel in Vienna. The results of these discussions paved the way for the adoption in December that year of UN Security Council Resolution 2254 laying out a roadmap for the peace process in Syria.
At one of the meetings, a sharp exchange took place between Iranian minister Jawad Zarif and Saudi minister Adel Al-Jubheir in which the Saudi referred to Iraq 2003 as a possible alternative model to achieve peace in Syria. A visibly angry John Kerry responded from the Chair to snuff out any discussion of Iraq where, in his words, “some idiot” had decided it was a good idea to disband the Iraqi army, destroy the Iraqi state and create the conditions for ISIS. There was an audible intake of breath from the assembled ministers as they watched a US Secretary of State damn the handicraft of his predecessors.
In retrospect, it was the very first decisions of the American rulers of Iraq in 2003 that set in motion the development of resistance to it. Paul Bremer, the US diplomat who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which took over the governance of Iraq after the US invasion, issued on arrival two fateful decrees.
CPA Order number 1 banned the Ba’ath party and removed all members of the party from government structures. In practice this meant the removal of all Iraqi state officials in any managerial positions since,under Saddam Hussein, being a member of the Party was a de facto prerequisite to be a state employee with any level of responsibility.
CPA Order number 2 disbanded the 400,000 strong Iraqi army without any provisions for taking back the soldiers’ guns or providing any programme for alternative livelihoods. With two strokes of a pen, Bremer had generated a class of angry unemployed civil servants and soldiers with expertise, knowledge and weapons at their disposal while at the same time weakening to the point of non-existence the capacities available to the future Iraqi government to counter them.
Anyone wanting to develop a handbook for how best to generate a dangerous insurgency could do no worse than look at the CPA model. Disbanding the army, in addition to creating a pool of discontented unemployed and armed soldiers, also left Iraq’s borders defenceless at a time when Zarqawi and others were organising the flow of foreign fighters into the country to form Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI).
In addition, US actions brought together secular Baathist military officers and people from AQI in the prisons where several of these officers were reported to have been radicalised. The final element of the mix was the authoritarian and sectarian government of Nouri al-Maliki which alienated Sunni leaders, resulting in them uniting with AQI into a single unified structure. The result was ISIS: “The top leadership of ISIS seems to have been populated by former Iraqi officers who were removed from their positions when the Iraqi army was disbanded in 2003.”
It was the combination of military expertise and religious zeal that made ISIS so effective and so lethal. But it was the US that had pushed people that should have been mortal enemies into making common cause.
Saddam Hussein’s number two, Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, on whom the US put a $10 million bounty, ran his own resistance movement in Iraq but there were many reports of him coordinating with ISIS, notably in the taking of Tikrit and Mosul in 2014, and he seems to have maintained close ties with a number of senior ISIS officials who had formally served as Iraqi army officers.
An example here is Samir al-Khlifawi, who, under the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, headed the military council of ISIS and led its successful operations to take over large parts of eastern Syria in 2013 from a house in Tell Rifaat, just north of Aleppo. Al-Khlifawi was formerly an Iraqi army intelligence colonel in the Baathist army. After the US invasion he was held in detention in Camp Bucca alongside many of the men who founded ISIS and reemerged as a key ally of their emir, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
So, going back to Kerry, the idiocy of the preparations for, and the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq led directly to the creation of ISIS, the territory it controlled in Syria during the most violent periods of the civil war, and at least a part of the reason why the challenge today of reuniting the country is so high.
The civil war parties and their international backers both used ISIS and the areas it controlled tactically to try to damage the other side. Both sides were also involved in different ways in financially maintaining it through purchases of the oil from the territory it controlled. Perhaps the best illustration of all this were the two ISIS operations to take Palmyra in 2015 and 2016.
Palmyra’s location in the desert meant that any military operation to take it required driving a convoy across the desert, the perfect target for an airstrike. Yet on both occasions, neither the Syrian air force (nor their Russian allies) nor the US led coalition against ISIS targeted the convoy, presumably because it was in both their tactical interests at the time for it to succeed in their operation, As explained to me by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura in 2016.
Impact on the genesis of Syria’s civil war
As anyone following the region knows today, among those the Syrians allowed to cross the border into Iraq was its current President, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who had been radicalised first by the second Intifada, then further by 9/11, and crossed the Iraqi border two weeks before the US invasion to be trained by Baathist officers.
On his second trip to Iraq in 2005, he became part of Al-Qaida in Iraq and was caught and imprisoned, falling in there with the nascent ISIS leadership. Under the nom de guerre Al-Jolani, he was authorised in August 2011 to set up a Syrian branch of Al-Qaida, known as Jabhat Al-Nusra.
However, when, in 2013, Al-Baghdadi ordered Jolani’s forces to merge into the new structure, Jolani refused. As a result, al-Nusra split with many of the foreign fighters leaving to join ISIS. There were a number of violent clashes between them during the civil war in Syria.
To understand why Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria had turned a blind eye to the development of Salafi jihadism in the east of Syria and to the funnelling of foreign fighters into Iraq from Syria following the US invasion, it is necessary to go further back. Syria could logically have become a US ally in both the fight against terrorism and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq for a number of reasons.
First, relations between the two Baathist regimes (Syria and Iraq) were historically awful. Syria had actively supported Iran during the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s, shutting down a key Iraqi oil pipeline, training Iranians in missile technology and even providing them with Scud B missiles.
Iraq had opposed Syria’s military involvement in the Lebanon war, and even armed Lebanese Christian militia leader Michel Aoun to put more pressure on Syria. Then, in 1991, Syria supported and provided troops to assist the US led coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The fall of Saddam was never going to be mourned by Syrian government circles.
Second, in 2000, the young and inexperienced Bashar had become President in Syria and there was much talk in the West about possible thawing of relations, particularly following the end of the Lebanese civil war. The opportunity certainly existed for a diplomatic opening and the EU had used the diplomatic space with the new President to accelerate negotiations for an Association Agreement with the country.
Third, Syria’s regime, by its very nature as Baathist pan-Arab, was secular in its approach and no fan of political Islam, with a long history of clamping down on it. Under different circumstances, it could have been enlisted by the US after 9/11 as an ally in the war against terror.
At the time there were some voices in the Bush administration, notably CIA Director George Tenet, who were seeking a softening of the US traditional positions on Syria. If the opportunity had been grasped, the benefits of a generalised strengthening of relations with the West would have maybe even enabled Bashar to take a different path, bringing Syrian civil society and its moderate internal opposition in from the cold and developing a more pluralist, even possibly democratic, approach to governing the country, as many observers at the time expected.
These opportunities were all missed, and a good portion of the blame has to be laid at the US’ door because of their rapid pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2001-3. Already as early as late September 2001, Bush was privately asking Donald Rumsfeld, his defence secretary, about Iraq invasion plans. Beyond the operational planning by the military, preparing the ground politically required a twisting of the logic behind the Afghanistan operation. It required convincing public opinion and US allies that a new military operation in a different region was justified as part of the response to 9/11.
A big part of solving this puzzle came in Bush’s State of the Union speech on 29 January 2002. What was expected to be a celebration of the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan is remembered for opening another front, with Bush proposing preemptive military action against a small list of countries (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) that could in his view provide their weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
As he put it “States like these, and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. Within a week of the speech, three quarters of US Americans believed Saddam Hussein was aiding Al-Qaida and the same number supported military action against Iraq.
A few months later, the list was expanded to include Syria, Libya and Cuba in a speech by John Bolton. Even though Syrian counter-terrorism cooperation with western secret services continued until several months after the US invasion, it was suspended after it became clear that there would be nothing gained from it by Syria.
Instead, the defensive links between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah were strengthened, ultimately leading to Syria being a central part of Iran’s proclaimed “axis of resistance”. This was set up to explicitly counter ideologically the impact of President Bush’ axis of evil speech. As with Powell’s references to Al-Zarqawi, a US speech had called into concrete the ghosts that they were mythically attacking.
As a result, when the US invaded Iraq, Syria strongly opposed the invasion and in the early months allowed foreign fighters to flow into Iraq to resist it. While domestically very popular, it resulted in the first moves by the US to isolate and sanction the regime with the adoption of the Syria Accountability Act in December 2003. The opportunity for a thaw in the Syria-US relationship was by now definitively lost. Perhaps, at the root, this was because, while the real reasons for invading Iraq had nothing to do with the war against terror, they certainly included the security threat to Israel of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. While Syria could have been a valuable US ally in countering terrorism, it was never going to be a friend of the US in protecting Israel’s security interests.
The invasion also created well-founded fears in Damascus that the US would intervene beyond Iraq. Calls for regime change were being made by many of the same neoconservative chorus that had called for the invasion of Iraq. Domestically, this strengthened the hands of the security establishment and conservatives within the regime, killing for good the possibilities of any gradual process of political reform in Syria.
Where the regime did respond to US pressure, it was in ways that did not respond to popular pressure for reform, such as closing the Palestinian offices in Damascus, withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, and making some tentative steps towards opening the Syrian economy. The path chosen by the new President was in the end one of continuity of the existing regime and this in turn would lead inexorably to the brutal and escalatory response to the 2011 protests in Daraa that sparked the uprising and then the civil war.
[1] Truls Hallberg Tonnessen. “Heirs of Zarqawi Or Saddam? The Relationship between Al-Qaida in Iraq and the Islamic State.” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015).
