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ISIS and the Shia Revival in Iraq
By Nicolas Pelham
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"We're ridding the world of polytheism, and spreading monotheism across the planet," an ISIS preacher recently said in a video recording. Behind him one could see the ISIS faithful using sledgehammers, bulldozers, and explosives to destroy the eighth-century-BC citadel of the Assyrian king Sargon II at Khorsabad, ten miles northwest of Mosul in northern Iraq, and the colossal statues of human-headed winged bulls that had guarded it. Amir al-Jumaili, an antiquities professor at Mosul University, has recorded the destruction of some 160 sites by ISIS since June 2014, when it conquered Iraq's second city. He showed me some recent entries in his logbook:

5 March 2015--Nimrud destroyed; 6 March 2015, Hatra destroyed; 9 March 2015, Khorsabad destroyed [i.e., the fourth capital of the Assyrians].
The full extent of the damage to these enormous and remote sites remains unclear. But on March 18, 2015, Iraq's distraught archaeologists and antiquities experts gathered for a government-sponsored conference in Baghdad. Iraq has 12,000 archaeological sites--too many to protect, I was told by Ahmed Kamel Mohammed, the director of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, the country's greatest collection of antiquities, which had been looted when the Americans took Baghdad in 2003. Some of the experts proposed drafting a UN Security Council resolution to entrust the protection of the sites to the US-led coalition. Others advocated the creation of a national antiquities guard. Iraq's national security adviser, Faleh Fayadh, promised to consider this and then nodded off during a presentation about the ancient temple to the sun god at Hatra, one of ISIS's reported targets. Islamic heritage has fared no better. In the 1920s puritanically strict Sunni fighters, who were followers of the eighteenth-century religious leader Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab and allies of the Saudi tribes, cleansed Mecca and Medina of saint-worship following their takeover. So their ISIS successors today set off explosions that demolished over a dozen mosques in Mosul. These included the Nithamiya, a twelfth-century Seljuk madrasa, which they razed because it contained a shrine to Ali al-Asghar, the youngest child of the great Shia imam Hussein, killed in the seventh century. Over two days in February 2015, al-Jumaili noted in his log, ISIS also set fire to Mosul's public library and theater. Some observers of ISIS say they find similarities between its cultural devastation and other state-building projects in the cantankerous region. But other motives also drive its madness. Since the nineteenth century, archaeologists had sought permission to dig beneath Nabi Yunus, the hilltop shrine of Jonah that is Mosul's landmark, in the hope of discovering the throne room of the Assyrian rulers reputed to lie below it. Perhaps, they speculated, it might house the loot Sargon II captured when he destroyed the Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BC and took its ten tribes into captivity. In the 1860s, the Ottoman governor had refused to let Sir Austen Henry Layard, an archaeologist from the British Museum, excavate, lest he violate the site's Islamic sanctity. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the new ISIS caliph, had no such qualms. Two days after blowing up Nabi Yunus in July 2014, ISIS summoned al-Jumaili and his colleagues to inspect the rubble for signs of the human-headed bulls and basalt reliefs. "They are digging, not just destroying," said Kamel, the balding, bespectacled director of the Baghdad museum. Behind their lofty pretensions to defend monotheism, ISIS zealots, it turns out, are petty tomb-raiders. The video that ISIS circulated of its demolition job on Mosul's antiquities museum in February 2015 was designed to market what it did not destroy. Of the thirty original pieces in the museum's Hatra hall, according to al-Jumaili, the ISIS jihadis had hacked at ten. They had not filmed the prehistoric, Islamic, and priceless Assyrian halls, because those artifacts were for sale. Their rampage through the Hatra hall, al-Jumaili surmised, was designed to boost demand and hike prices on the black market. An Iraqi government adviser estimated that the caliphate might have already earned hundreds of millions of dollars from its sales of Assyrian remains. ISIS, the adviser told me, is the world's best-financed terrorist organization, worth an estimated $8 billion. But with America bombing its oil installations, it was anxious to diversify revenues. (These figures for ISIS finances can't be confirmed but are widely believed by the informed Iraqis I talked to.) Such is the profiteering that people in Mosul increasingly wonder where the money acquired by ISIS is going. Aside from the construction of a new desert highway running from Mosul to Raqqa, its first capital, in Syria, there is scant sign of ISIS's billions. With government salaries barely trickling into Mosul, many locals complain of struggling to make ends meet. They know very well that the abduction and rape of thousands of Yazidi girls by ISIS have been legalized by its leaders as "the spoils of war" and that ISIS has taken over the property and belongings of hundreds of thousands who have fled the city. A doctor who fled Mosul with his family in March spoke of mounting fear at the executions. Initially, he told me, ISIS restricted its beheadings to the square outside the city administration building. But in recent months jihadis with machetes would stop traffic at intersections in the suburbs, decapitate people, and leave. ISIS is not alone in public beheadings but no other group makes such a show of it. Rather than motivated by mere bloodlust, the practice seems designed, according to one theory, to provoke its opponents abroad to crack down on their domestic Salafi groups, and thereby broaden ISIS's base. As much as they condemn violence, people in Mosul express anger at the foreign Islamists who are among the prime beneficiaries of the new order. In its 2015 manual for women, ISIS contrasts its favorable treatment of expatriates with that of the "hypocritical states" of the Gulf, where expatriates are obligated to pay a residency tax (iqamah) as if they were People of the Book, as if they are not equal to the people of the country in work, in healthcare, in social life and everything else. To hell with these laws, to hell with nationalism! Instead of this, in my state here, the Chechen is a friend of a Syrian, the Hijazi a neighbour of a Kazakh. Lineages are mixed, tribes merged and races joined under the banner of monotheism, resulting in a new generation integrating the cultures of many different peoples into a beautiful and harmonious alliance. According to Iraq's prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, foreigners make up 43 percent of ISIS's fighting strength of 20,000 men. In some parts of Mosul like Josak, an upscale district, residents told me, English and French are more widely heard than Arabic. Blond Americans are said to have taken over the Turkish consulate. A policeman who fled his hometown of Hit in Anbar province after its capture by ISIS received a photo on his cell phone of his house. The word waqf, which refers to endowments Muslims make to a religious or charitable cause, had been scrawled on its walls. "Saudis, Tunisians have taken it over," he told me. "They must have sold my furniture and stolen my savings." Foreigners have also secured important posts. A dual German-Egyptian national, Sameh Dhu al-Kurnain, now heads Mosul University's education department. Perplexingly, he has closed the French department, which the great Orientalist Louis Massignon helped establish in the early 1950s, but not the English department; he has banned Iraqis from completing their studies abroad. "In the land of the Caliphate we need mujahideen, not doctorates from the land of the kuffar [i.e., the nonbelievers]," he explained when a medic sought an exit permit. "So how come you have a German doctorate?" the medic bravely rejoined. "I left my wife, I left Germany and married jihad," replied the Egyptian, suggesting the medic do the same. Apparently concerned by rising discontent in Mosul, the ISIS Caliphate has backtracked on its earlier easing of restrictions. Following a series of explosions in the city, apparently by opponents operating much like World War II partisans, it has restored many checkpoints, this time under foreign, not Iraqi, guard. Some Naqshbandi Sufi mystics and former army officers who used to join ISIS for Friday prayers are reported to be keeping their distance from it. "People are starting to hate religion," I was told by an academic who has stopped praying for the first time in thirty-four years, even at home. Facebook posts by people inside Mosul mock the absurdities of ISIS's faith. But with the more educated and able citizens finding escape routes, those left behind may lack the leadership to challenge ISIS. Many who have known no rule but tyranny are resigned to swapping one dictatorship for another. Any change in the status quo will likely depend on forces outside the city. At Baghdad's once-luxurious Al Mansour Hotel a hundred sheikhs from Anbar, a mainly Sunni province west of the city, crowded into a ballroom to declare that they would fight for Prime Minister al-Abadi's government--provided that any territory recovered from ISIS would revert to their control. (A New York Times map published on April 24 indicates that much of the northern half of Anbar province is under ISIS control.) The sheikhs were the latest group to support al-Abadi's initiative to reconstitute the Sahwa, a conglomeration of Sunni tribal forces that, at its peak, numbered 90,000 and expelled al-Qaeda from Iraq's Sunni cities. Further north, al-Abadi succeeded in raising a 1,500-strong force of Sunni tribesmen, which, he said, would make up the vanguard for retaking Mosul. Army generals had confidently blustered that a counterattack would take place this spring. And yet the Sahwa force that al-Abadi has assembled so far is a meager fraction of its previous size, and little match for ISIS's battle-hardened fighters. The record of fighting in Tikrit, 110 miles from Baghdad, suggests that the task will be daunting. A few hundred ISIS fighters held out against a 24,000-strong government force for two months. Only after the US began bombing ISIS positions from the air did government forces finally wrest control of the city. ISIS's force in Mosul is perhaps twenty-five times larger and more readily reinforced from Turkey and Syria, where ISIS controls large swaths of the east. For now at least, the US-led coalition is only bombing ISIS at its edges, demarcating borders with its neighbors, not threatening its nerve centers. Nor will it launch an intensive bombing of Mosul to dislodge ISIS as long as over a million civilians are living there. For all the official bravado, al-Abadi is unlikely to be claiming a victory in Mosul anytime soon. Nor, for all their distrust of ISIS, is it clear that most Sunnis favor such an assault. Many have come to regret promises of liberation since the Americans first marched into Iraq. They fear it could be a euphemism for a fresh bout of sectarian cleansing. "Why should militiamen from Basra in the south invade a city in the north?" asked Taha Hamid al-Zaydi, a Sunni preacher and spokesman for the capital's Sunni clerical establishment, which is based at Baghdad's Abu Hanifa mosque. "It will simply make matters worse." Each time I try to talk to him about ISIS he lists the crimes the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad continues to commit against Sunnis. "Life is normal in Mosul," al-Zaydi says. "People of Mosul are more afraid of the future than of the present. We fear huge massacres to come." As we leave, my driver Abbas tells me, with an eye on his rearview mirror, that al-Zaydi's underlings in the corridor had joked about how much ransom I might fetch. Yet Sunni fears are not without basis. Ten days after Mosul's capture, as ISIS approached Baghdad airport, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite spiritual leader based in Iraq's Shia shrine city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, issued a call for jihad against ISIS and its Sunni allies. In their panic, cloistered and quietist Shia clerics who for a decade had struck pacifist poses turned into militant mullahs. The night I arrived in Najaf, a Qatari Shiite preacher, Nazar al-Qatari, had put on military fatigues to rally worshipers after evening prayers. All were obliged, he cried, to fight for Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, against "the slayers of Imams Hasan and Hussein"--i.e., great imams of Shia history--and join in what the clerics have dubbed the hashad shaabi, or popular mobilization. To ward off the threat to Baghdad from the Sunni north, Shiite volunteers converged on its streets from the south. Baghdad's public space feels overwhelmingly Shiite. Leaders of Shiite militias who had previously denounced al-Sistani's vacillation now celebrated his de facto legalization of the militias' advance. Abu Jaafar Darraji, a senior commander from the Badr Organization, the largest and most openly pro-Iranian of the militias, told me that not even Khamenei's predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had dared to declare such an open-ended jihad against a Sunni enemy. In the recruiting center he ran in Baghdad he had covered the walls with portraits of Ayatollah Khamenei and al-Sistani. The ones of al-Sistani had stencils of guns on them. With a fresh supply of arms and training from Iran, Darraji claimed that his Badr militia could outgun the official Iraqi army and set up an alternative system of government. Pointing at Khamenei's portrait, he said, "He's the wali amr al-muslimeen, the legal ruler in all the Muslim lands." Once the militia--the hashad--had accomplished its mission of vanquishing ISIS, it would, he said, be the Iraqi branch of Iran's Basij, the zealous youth group of vigilantes Khomeini founded in 1979 to uphold his revolution and purge Iran of his enemies. Iran's presence, once a hidden force, has shed its camouflage. On billboards in the capital he struck with rockets during the war with Iraq of 1980--1988, Khomeini now can be seen holding a map of Iraq in his hand. Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian commander of the Quds Force, a division of Iran's Revolutionary Guards that functions as the Iranian revolution's foreign legion, has toured front lines in Iraq where the militias he backed fought against ISIS. His close adviser is the hashad's deputy chief, an Iranian-Iraqi dual national--and veteran of the covert war between Iran and the US--called Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. He is still on America's terrorism list for bombing the US and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983. When the Americans tried to capture him in 2007, he fled to Iran. Yet he now shares Baghdad's government enclave, the Green Zone, with the American embassy. With over 100,000 registered recruits the hashad is willing to expend young lives. While I sat at the gates of Najaf's shrine, a fresh funeral cortege arrived every five minutes. Each makeshift coffin is wrapped as if for a military funeral--flags made in China stuck on with sticky tape. Relatives wept; fellow fighters stared blankly ahead awaiting their turn to go to the front lines like sheep in an abattoir. In much the same way as Ayatollah Khomeini sent his human waves to block Saddam Hussein's eight-year invasion, so large numbers of low-income southern Shiites are heading north. "We know we're going to die. We go to the front as if on a pilgrimage," an armchair apologist with a UNESCO seat in religious studies at the local university told me. The editor of a local periodical, al-Asala, is more circumspect: "They don't send their sons to the front," he said. "They send the poor." Such is that supply that the Shia militias have enough excess manpower to carve out Sunni-free zones in and around Baghdad. At his fortified villa in Baghdad, Mudher al-Janabi, a Sunni tribal leader and politician, despairs of ever leading his tribesmen back to their home village of Jurf al-Sakhar, just south of Baghdad. Local officials had failed to repair the irrigation system from the Euphrates, he said. The farmlands of his region, regarded as Baghdad's breadbasket, had turned into caked scrub. Some of his kinsmen had changed their names from Omar, a Sunni name, to Ammar, a neutral one, in the hope that they might slip through Shiite militia checkpoints barring their return. Al-Abadi had promised to include Sunnis in the Iraqi government but al-Janabi didn't believe him. "What can the prime minister do?" he asks. "He's not in charge." The huge cavernous Republican Palace in Baghdad seems several sizes too big for al-Abadi and his allies. Saddam filled it with his megalomania; America with its occupying army of soldiers, spies, and carpetbaggers; and Nouri al-Maliki, the previous prime minister, with many lackeys. Walking through it, I passed the locked offices of Paul Bremer, the American governor who dismissed Iraq's army, gutted its state infrastructure, and laid the foundations of its current dysfunction. I passed no officials. Where in that silent opulence were all the king's men? Al-Abadi, a jolly man, recalled to me his modest home in Karrada, a central Baghdad neighborhood. It had a small garden, he said, where friends sometimes visited him on a summer evening, sipping lemon and mint tea, klaxons hooting from the streets. "I was about to move in after I had it renovated," he says sadly. "And they made me prime minister." For all its successes, he worries that the hashad might prove a double-edged sword. The militias have punctured the psychological pall that ISIS cast over Iraq, which he insists is half the battle, and for the first time they have forced ISIS onto the defensive. But "any force which you arm is a threat," he tells me, sounding more like a pundit than Iraq's chief decision-maker. "I remember in some countries with a history of coups d'



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