Global Radical Islamist Insurgency: Al Qaeda and Islamic State Networks Focus: A Small Wars Journal Anthology

Global Radical Islamist Insurgency:

AL QAEDA AND ISLAMIC STATE NETWORKS FOCUS

VOL. II: 2012-2014

A Small Wars Journal Anthology

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Contents

Acronyms

Preface: Knowing the Enemy and Knowing Ourselves

Foreword: The Islamic State’s Growth and Misrule, and the Future of Violent Non-State Actors

Introduction: Global Radical Islamist Insurgency— Al Qaeda and Islamic State Networks Focus

Radical Islamist OPFORs (Opposition Forces) and Context

Chapter 1: Criminal Organizations, Competitive Advantage and State Failure in Afghanistan

Chapter 2: Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism

Chapter 3: Criminalization of the Syrian Conflict

Chapter 4: Book Review: The Black Banners

Chapter 5: A Review: Ten Years Later: Insights on al-Qaida’s Past and Future through Captured Records

Chapter 6: Revelations on the Killing of Osama bin Laden

Chapter 7: War on Terror: Radicalization and Expansion of the Threats

Chapter 8: Abu Sayyaf Crime, Ideology, Autonomy Movement? The Complex Evolution of a Militant Islamist Group in the Philippines

Chapter 9: Virtual Indoctrination and the Digihad: The Evolution of Al-Qaeda’s Media Strategy

Chapter 10: Zawahiri and Gaza’s Information Terrain

Chapter 11: Book Review: Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11

Chapter 12: The Growth of Islamism in the Pakistan Army

Chapter 13: The Egyptian Sinai: A New Front for Jihadist Activity

Chapter 14: The Pakistani Godfather: The Inter-Services Intelligence and the Afghan Taliban 1994-2010

Chapter 15: Under the Veil of Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Statements by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in the Context of Contemporary Political Dynamics

Chapter 16: The Ansar of Yemen: The Huthis and al-Qaeda

Chapter 17: Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones and Its Impact on the Arab Spring

Chapter 18: A Message of Felicitation from the Esteemed Amir-Ul-Momineen on the Occasion of Eid: An Analysis of Taliban Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr Statements from 2006 to 2012

Chapter 19: Terrorism.com: Classifying Online Islamic Radicalism as a Cybercrime

Chapter 20: Blood in Shallow Waters: A Facet of Al Qaeda’s Stratagem

Chapter 21: Tit-For-Tat: Kenya, Somalia, and the Resurgence of al-Shabaab

Chapter 22: The Process of Radicalization

Chapter 23: Radical Islamic Terrorism: An Evolving and Enduring Threat

Chapter 24: Thrilla in Minnesota: Al-Shabaab vs. The Somali Diaspora

Chapter 25: Al-Shabaab and the Exploitation of the Subject Network Model

Chapter 26: A Genealogy of Egyptian Islamic Radicalism

Chapter 27: At a Crossroads: Flashpoints and Opportunities in U.S. Relations with the Muslim Brotherhood [Excerpt]

Chapter 28: The Utilization and Leveraging of Grievance as a Recruitment Tool and Justification for Terroristic Acts Committed by Islamic Extremists

Chapter 29: The Lay-Out of Westgate Mall and its Significance in the Westgate Mall Attack in Kenya

Chapter 30: The IMU Ascendant: How Uzbek Autocracy Empowers Terrorist Entrepreneurs

Chapter 31: Northern Mali Conflict 2012: How Algerian Militants Transformed into an Al-Qaeda Affiliate and Penetrated an Ethnic Cleavage to Remain Relevant

Chapter 32: A Fight for Narratives in the Battle Against Extremism

Chapter 33: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Theory and Practice of Jihad

Chapter 34: Next Stop Baghdad: ISIL’s Capturing of Mosul

Chapter 35: ISIS: Public Legitimacy Through the Reenactment of Islam’s Early History

Chapter 36: State Piracy in Syria (And Iraq): ISIS Takeover of Territory

Chapter 37: From the Guy Next Door to the Fighter Overseas: A Look at Four Foreign Fighters who Joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Chapter 38: Syria’s Foreign Fighter Dilemma

Chapter 39: Decentralization: The Future of ISIS

Chapter 40: A Ticket to Turkey and a Desire to Fight: Why Some Foreign Fighters Travel to Syria

Chapter 41: The Islamic State is a Hybrid Threat: Why Does That Matter?

Chapter 42: ISIS Resurgence and the Sunni-Shi’a Schism

Chapter 43: Spotlight on Australian Jihadists in the Middle East

U.S.-Allied Policy and Counter Radical Islamist Strategies

Chapter 44: Assessing the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Efforts Targeting America’s Muslims

Chapter 45: The War on Terror—Over?

Chapter 46: Why Did Violence Decline During the US Surge in Iraq?

Chapter 47: Who’s on First? Or Why Fences Matter More Than Al-Qaeda in Mali

Chapter 48: The War on Terror… Over? Part 2

Chapter 49: Is the War on Terrorism Over? Long Live Unconventional Warfare

Chapter 50: Assessing Two Countering Violent Extremism Programs: Saudi Arabia’s PRAC and the United Kingdom’s Prevent Strategy

Chapter 51: Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on al Qaeda

Chapter 52: A Strategy for Dealing with the Islamic Jihad

Chapter 53: One More Thought on Unconventional Approaches to Dealing with al Qaeda: If the Afghans Kick Us Out, Let’s Hire the Haqqanis

Chapter 54: Defeating Baghdadi: The War We Don’t Want But Will Have to Fight

Chapter 55: Op Ed: An Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) First Strategy

Chapter 56: If You Liked Vietnam, You’ll Love the War With the Islamic State

Chapter 57: Why Reasoning with ISIS is a Useless Concept

Chapter 58: Defeating ISIS and Their Complex Way of War

Chapter 59: Employing Armor Against the Islamic State: The Inevitable Urban Combined Arms Fight

Chapter 60: Fear, Inertia, and Islam

Chapter 61: The Rise of the Islamic State and How to Reverse It

Chapter 62: What if the Military Has Been Focusing on the Wrong Thing the Whole Time?

Chapter 63: Opportunities to Combat Violent Religious Extremism

Chapter 64: Obama’s Strategy for Defeating ISIS is the Only Viable Option: It Can Work

Chapter 65: Rethinking Our Strategy in Iraq and Syria

Chapter 66: Organizing for War: Overcoming Barriers to Whole-of-Government Strategy in the ISIL Campaign

Postscript: The Criminal Caliphate

Notes

Notes on Contributors

Acronyms

Preface:

Knowing the Enemy and Knowing Ourselves

Matt Begert

El Segundo, CA

September 2015

Volume II of the Global Radical Islamist Insurgency collection continues the pace-setting work of Small Wars Journal in it’s observation, analysis, and description of the evolving threat and the identification of policy, strategy and operational art required to counter it. The artful reference and use of the collective wisdom of The Small Wars Manual, the basic tenets of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, is a necessary imperative for understanding current and future conflicts with which the world now must acknowledge, confront, deter, and eventually defeat. More contemporary concepts of conflict like Colonel John Boyd’s Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) Loop and Admiral Bill McRaven’s Principles of Special Operations and concept of Relative Superiority also emerge as methods to frame the analysis and policy of Volume II.

Much of what is contained in this continuing volume of global radical Islamist insurgency is about evolution. There is now enough observation and analysis of this threat metamorphosis to bring clarity for policy, strategy and operational art. There is an acceleration of this developmental evolution. Volume I tracked observations and analysis influencing a 4-year period but the time frame focus for Volume II is half that, indicating a quickening pace to the insurgency. This, too, should be a consideration for policy and strategy.

One of the many values of both volumes is the collective synergy. The authors have done a masterful job of selecting varied scholarly and operational works of analysis and thoughtful opinion to assemble a compilation that reveals origin, past and present activity, and future trajectory. The completed picture of what is going on and what will most likely happen can be painted using these volumes as the guide. Each contributor brings differing viewpoints and different experiences to the work. That combination describes an overall perspective of a movement that contains essential elements of information vital for effective policy decision making and the development of focused supporting strategy.

This work and future anthologies give context to the wisdom of concepts of conflict. Clausewitz’s enduring Policy-Determines-Strategy and Sun Tzu’s Know-Yourself-and-Know-the-Enemy can be tailored for this modern war where brutal tradecraft of the past (beheading) exists with seemingly science-fiction-like technology (unmanned aerial vehicle bombing). The operational art frameworks of McRaven and Boyd can be used for case study analysis and reponse.

This anthology, which should continue with additional volumes, is also valuable as the record of how 21st Century conflict has changed. Just as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu described the nature of war from different perspectives, times, and cultures but identified similar enduring properties; so, too, can it be done now. The greatest value of this anthology series is its functions as an enabler. It gives policymakers the opportunity to craft meaningful policy, strategists the ability to develop effective strategy, and operational artists a perspective for knowing the enemy and knowing ourselves.

Foreword:

The Islamic State’s Growth and Misrule, and the Future of Violent Non-State Actors

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Bridget Moreng

Washington, DC

July 2015

The Islamic State (IS) managed a stunning offensive that captured several major Iraqi cities years after it had—with justification—been declared defeated. More than a year after its most dramatic military gains, the group continues to hold more territory than some populous countries possess, and remains capable of launching offensives to gain new territory (though it is also experiencing territorial losses in other parts of its caliphate). It is representative of the emergence of a new kind of violent non-state actor (VNSA) in a world where the Westphalian state’s period of dominance has come to an end: IS has a military force capable of employing both conventional and unconventional tactics, a security apparatus adept at enforcing law and eliminating internal threats, and a diversified economy that includes a taxation system and customs regime. This does not make IS wholly new, as both Hizballah and the Tamil Tigers had blazed this path previously, but IS has succeeded in taking several trends concerning VNSAs to their logical extension. IS is now able to dominate regional foes, is technologically empowered, and innovates at a pace that can rival your average Silicon Valley start-up. And unlike past VNSAs that took on state-like attributes, the Islamic State has no interest in being admitted into the club of nation-states. Instead, it wants to break the system.

To put it mildly, IS hasn’t always pursued a wise strategy. After the group’s dramatic offensive in June 2014 that allowed it to capture Mosul, Tikrit, and other major Iraqi cities, IS seemed hellbent on making as many enemies as possible. IS betrayed groups that had aided its advance, including Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqat al-Naqshabandia (JRTN), Ansar al-Islam, Jaysh al-Mujahedin, and the General Military Council of Iraqi Revolutionaries; attacked factions that were not at war with it, such as the Kurds in northern Iraq; and committed atrocities against religious minorities that were alarming enough to help drag in an international coalition designed to contain and defeat it. But the anti-IS coalition has lacked coordination, and the United States in particular has overlooked several promising avenues for combating IS.

As a result, though the Islamic State has lost ground in several areas of Iraq and parts of Syria, the process of pushing it back has been a slow grind in which gains are sometimes almost imperceptible, rather than a sprint to retake IS’s holdings. From a U.S. perspective, the fact that Iranian-backed forces have been the most effective at reversing IS’s gains offers little comfort. And while the Islamic State’s holdings have loosened slowly, the group remains capable of launching offensives on two separate fronts in the Iraq-Syria theater, and has seen new groups take up arms under IS’s banner in several countries where it had little to no presence at the time it declared itself a caliphate.

Table: The Islamic State’s Various Names*

*NOTE: Despite the group’s many name changes, this foreword refers to it as IS throughout for ease of reading.

Adapted from Aaron Zelin, The War Between ISIS and al-Qaeda (2014).

The Islamic State’s Roots

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, IS’s predecessor organization, was established in 2004 in the midst of the U.S.-led Iraq war, but the group’s organizational roots were laid earlier by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In 1992, the former street thug Zarqawi joined the jihadist organization Bayat al-Imam. He later ended up sidelining his mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, while both were incarcerated in Jordan. According to a New York Times report, Zarqawi’s actions toward Maqdisi while both were imprisoned amounted to a coup.[1]

Following Zarqawi’s 1999 release from prison as part of a general amnesty, he and a number of followers traveled to Afghanistan, where Zarqawi met al-Qaeda’s then-emir, Osama bin Laden. In The Atlantic, Mary Anne Weaver noted that bin Laden distrusted and disliked al-Zarqawi immediately. There were several reasons, including bin Laden’s suspicion that Zarqawi’s group had been compromised by Jordanian intelligence due to the circumstances of Zarqawi’s release from prison, and also Zarqawi’s personality. Zarqawi came across, Weaver writes, as aggressively ambitious, abrasive, and overbearing, and possessed a burning hatred of Shias that seemed like it could cause problems. Yet Zarqawi refused to back down even to bin Laden, reportedly saying, Shiites should be executed.[2]

Zarqawi established a training camp in Herat, Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda funded his activities during this period. His Herat camp had a population estimated at between 2,000 to 3,000 and was the only training camp in the country to actively recruit from the Levant region.

The U.S.’s October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan prompted Zarqawi to flee, and he quickly established a new base of operations in Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. Zarqawi’s forces, which had operated under the banner of Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad from 1999 onward, recruited and developed a logistical support infrastructure. They were ready to take advantage of the chaotic situation when the United States invaded Iraq.

IS in the Iraq War

Following the U.S. invasion, Zarqawi’s campaign was designed to undermine U.S. reconstruction efforts and inflame sectarian tensions. His fighters became notorious, including for the highly publicized beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg. One of Zarqawi’s most brutal—and effective—tactics was sectarian attacks against Shias. This targeting was designed to provoke Shias to retaliate against Sunnis: If sectarian killings escalated, IS could insert itself as the protector of Sunnis.

In February 2006, IS bombed the Askariya shrine in Samarra, which was so important to Iraq’s Shias that Iraqi vice president Adel Abdul Mahdi contextualized the attack as being as 9/11 is in the United States. Shia reprisals against Sunnis were swift, devastating, and largely indiscriminate—and IS’s belief that escalating sectarian tensions would empower it proved correct.

Despite bin Laden’s dislike of Zarqawi, the latter man deepened his relationship with al-Qaeda during the Iraq war, and pledged bayat (an oath of allegiance) to bin Laden in October 2004. But this relationship was always fraught with tension, largely centered around the way Zarqawi’s organization relished its brutality. Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s deputy emir, reprimanded Zarqawi for his penchant for beheading victims in a letter urging him not to be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the shaykh of the slaughterers. He warned that these fanatics do not express the general view of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq. (No pacifist, Zawahiri noted that we can kill the captives by bullet in lieu of beheadings, which would achieve that which is sought after without exposing ourselves to the questions and answering to doubts.)[3]

Though the brutal approach adopted by Zarqawi—who died in a June 2006 U.S. air strike—would ultimately undermine IS’s efforts, it didn’t stop his organization from controlling territory for a sustained period in Sunni-dominated Anbar province. A report written by Colonel Peter Devlin in August 2006 described IS as the dominant organization of influence in Anbar, and said the group had become an integral part of the social fabric of western Iraq.[4] Most Anbari Sunnis disliked IS but saw it as an inevitable part of their lives that would be foolhardy to oppose.

IS’s governance involved the implementation of a harsh version of sharia (Islamic law). In Mosul, IS’s quixotic understanding of sharia reportedly led it to ban the side-by-side display of tomatoes and cucumbers by food vendors, in addition to banning a local bread known as sammoun, the use of ice, and the use of electric razors by barbers. These restrictions were Monty Python-esque, but the punchline was grim: Iraqis were killed or tortured for flouting these rules.

In part due to its own excesses, in addition to a surge of American troops and the U.S.’s move to population-centric counterinsurgency, IS’s success was short-lived. The jihadist group’s brutality prompted a Sunni tribal rebellion. After a few false starts in which IS crushed its nascent opposition, in September 2006 a number of sheikhs publicly announced their plan to fight IS, making the announcement at Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha’s home in Ramadi. They called their movement the Sahwa, or Awakening. Even Sunni Islamist groups had grown weary of IS, and a number of IS’s former insurgent allies turned against it, sometimes being incorporated into the Sahwa, which was expanded throughout Iraq. At its height, more than 100,000 predominantly Sunni Iraqis participated in this program.

IS lost Anbar province in 2007. By June 2010, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen assessed the group as devastated.

IS’s Resurgence

Although IS suffered considerable losses and experienced a dramatic decline in popular support, the group was able to mount a comeback. Significant to IS’s rebound was the relationship it established with deposed Baathists. The de-Baathification of Iraq’s army in 2003 left thousands of Sunni officers jobless and vengeful, and inclined to join the insurgency for a mixture of political and personal reasons. One such man was Haji Bakr (born Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khilfawi), a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service: The German newspaper Der Spiegel later recovered documents demonstrating the key role he played in IS’s 2014 resurgence.[5] Bakr joined with insurgent forces after being ousted from the Iraqi army, eventually meeting Zarqawi. But Bakr and his other post-Baathist brethren were excluded from top positions in IS until 2009, a period in which the group suffered significant military losses.

Iraq specialist Brian Fishman noted in a 2011 study that IS switched its mode of operation as momentum swung against it, giving up efforts to control territory and impose governance, and instead adopting a more traditional terrorist model built on an underground organization and occasional large-scale attacks.[6] IS also took on an increasingly indigenous identity, sensitive to the fact that it was seen as basically a foreign entity during Zarqawi’s reign of terror. The four major factors in IS’s resurgence were the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, Sunni disenfranchisement, the civil war in neighboring Syria, and the ex-Baathists’ establishment of intelligence and administration capabilities.

The U.S.’s troop withdrawal proved significant to IS’s rebound not only because American forces were not in the country to respond rapidly as IS advanced, but because it emboldened Iraq’s Shia-dominated government in ruling in a highly sectarian manner. Sahwa members experienced particularly significant marginalization. Beginning in 2010, Iraq’s central government began working to weaken the Sahwa forces, despite the efforts of the United States and Sunni politicians to promote the Sahwa’s integration into the ministries of interior and defense. Baghdad stripped fighters of their military ranks, reduced pay, and seized weapons. This rough treatment pushed hundreds of Sahwa members to defect to the Sunni insurgents. After U.S. troops withdrew in December 2011, the Shia-led government headed by Nouri al-Maliki almost immediately issued an arrest warrant for the highest-ranking Sunni politician, vice president Tareq al-Hashimi.

Baghdad’s uneven treatment of Sunni politicians and neighborhoods came at a time when the war in neighboring Syria was escalating. The Syrian civil war gave IS the ability to control territory in another theater, allowing the group to gain money and amass military resources there.

A final significant factor was secret intelligence cells placed in towns and cities that IS wanted to capture—a quiet intelligence state conceived by Haji Bakr. These cells gathered the information necessary to secure a quick takeover: mapping powerful families and individuals, understanding their sources of income, detailing the names and sizes of armed groups, and gleaning information about their leaders’ failings and vulnerabilities for blackmail purposes. This intelligence allowed IS to rapidly capture territory, just as Baathist expertise at imposing repressive governance institutions aided IS’s sustainability.

The combination of these factors allowed IS to launch a stunning offensive at the beginning of January 2014. Sunni dissatisfaction boiled over into the establishment of longstanding protest camps decrying the government’s sectarianism. When the Iraqi government mobilized its military at the beginning of 2014 to clear these camps out, IS mobilized also, capturing large parts of Fallujah and Ramadi. The timing of this offensive was significant: Not only were there tactical reasons for IS to strike when the military was clearing Sunnis out of the camps (while the security forces were distracted), but the offensive also symbolically positioned IS as the protector of Iraq’s Sunnis.

In addition to strengthening IS, the Syria war produced irresolvable tensions between IS and al-Qaeda. IS unilaterally expanded into Syria, where it muscled in on the territory of al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch Jabhat al-Nusra and set off a conflict between the two affiliates. Eventually al-Qaeda assessed that the costs of maintaining IS as an affiliate outweighed the benefits, particularly after multiple mediation efforts between IS and Nusra broke down and it became clear that IS would not submit to new al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri’s authority. Al-Qaeda released a statement in February 2014 disavowing IS.

This did not stop IS from launching an explosive military advance from Syria into Iraq in June 2014. IS had already controlled territory, most significantly the city of Raqqa in Syria, but in June IS captured Mosul, Tikrit, and other territory. It promptly declared at the end of the month that it had reestablished the caliphate, a longstanding jihadist goal.

Though IS continued to make some gains thereafter, its ongoing advances also produced some overreach. In August 2014, for example, IS launched a surprise attack on Iraq’s Kurdish region at a time when the Kurdish Regional Government’s peshmerga forces weren’t fighting it. IS then immediately mounted a genocidal campaign against the Yazidi minority religious sect, which posed no military threat to the caliphate. This move would draw more foes to the theater, including the United States and other Western countries.

Fortunately for IS, the large coalition responding to it has always lacked coordination. As a result, IS has succeeded in maintaining its hold over territory in Iraq and Syria, and has set its sights on establishing new footholds across the globe.

IS’s Subsequent Military Campaigns

IS has been involved in several subsequent campaigns that are indicative of its current strengths and also vulnerabilities.

The September-October 2014 Anbar campaign. In September 2014, IS launched a devastatingly effective offensive in Anbar province led by Umar al-Shishani (born Tarkhan Batirashvili), a twenty-eight-year-old field commander of Chechen origin who was born in Georgia’s Pankisi Valley. He served in an intelligence unit in the Georgian army before becoming involved in jihadist militancy.

Prior to the Anbar campaign, IS had been losing ground. Notably, it began withdrawing from western Ramadi in the face of the Iraqi security forces’ (ISF) advance. More than 300 IS members fled from Fallujah, a sign that the group saw even its oldest stronghold in the province as subject to the credible threat of attack.

The Iraqi military attempted to take advantage of IS’s weakened state by moving the Rapid Intervention Force (an elite unit intended for short-term strike operations) into position for a move against Fallujah. Shishani allowed ISF to advance for several days in mid-September before beginning his counterattack on September 18. Essentially, Shishani waited until the ISF had fully committed against a different, Baathist-oriented militant group, and managed to catch the Rapid Intervention Force completely off-guard. He encircled them, trapping an entire battalion for six days. Using chlorine gas and captured Iraqi military vehicles, Shishani massacred 300 to 500 Iraqi troops and brought 180 back to Fallujah as prisoners. This was the biggest IS victory in two months.

Following this victory on September 22, Shishani spent the next two weeks making preparations and summoning reinforcements from Syria. His attack on Hit began on October 2, and IS completed its seizure of the city on October 13, then moved to secure the outlying villages of Bustamiyah, Sahliyah, Kassarah, Khazraj, and Dulab. Though IS’s campaign stalled during this period as it was unable to take Amiriyah and experienced stiffening tribal resistance, the group would later return its focus to Anbar province and capture Ramadi, at a time when IS’s losses were mounting elsewhere in the country. One thing this campaign demonstrated is IS’s ability to make significant gains when using a light and highly mobile force, and employing guerrilla-style tactics.

The Kobani campaign. Umar al-Shishani’s tactics in the September-October 2014 Anbar offensive stand in stark contrast to the group’s efforts to take the northern Syrian town of Kobani—which sits in a predominantly Kurdish area near the Turkish border—during the same period. IS’s push to capture it began in mid-September and, by mid-October, observers believed Kobani would eventually fall to IS. General Lloyd Austin, the commander of U.S. Central Command, stated that it was highly possible that Kobani would fall. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan also assessed that Kobani was about to fall.

But despite the advantages that IS enjoyed in trying to take Kobani, the group’s military campaign was flawed: Its method of advance, reliant on heavy armor, left IS’s fighters vulnerable to coalition air strikes. One militant commented, I swear by God, their planes did not leave the air, day and night; they did airstrikes all day and night. They targeted everything. They even attacked motorcycles; they have not left a building standing.[7] The aerial campaign made room for Kurdish reinforcements to arrive. In late October, Turkey finally allowed Iraqi peshmerga forces to cross through Turkish territory into Kobani. By the end of January 2015, Kobani had seemingly been spared from IS—though the city had been reduced to rubble.

IS’s loss of Kobani after a four-month advance into which the group channeled significant resources was a major blow. IS displayed poor military strategy, as the group expended a disproportionate amount of resources in an attempt to take territory that had little strategic value. Around 1,200 IS combatants died in the assault on Kobani, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and in particular IS sacrificed some of its elite cadres in an ultimately futile effort to capture the city.

The recapture of Tikrit. On March 2, 2015, a group described as Iraqi forces—though containing a heavy component of Iranian-backed Shia militias—launched a major offensive to take back the IS-held city of Tikrit in Salah al-Din province. This offensive highlighted major fissures between the U.S. and Iran as both work to undo IS’s gains.

A Sunni majority city, the battle for Tikrit was of strategic and symbolic importance. In the initial days of the offensive, Iraqi government and Shia militia forces advanced on Tikrit from three directions. But progress was slow due to IS’s use of snipers, booby traps, and suicide bombers—as well as the absence of U.S. airpower for most of the campaign, due to the U.S.’s hesitance to cooperate with Iran. On March 25, the U.S. finally began conducting airstrikes over Tikrit after the Iraqi government formally requested assistance. Demonstrating the coalition’s lack of coordination, Iranian-backed forces waited on the sidelines during the U.S.’s air assault, though accounts differ about whether their decision to do so was one of the U.S.’s preconditions or their own protest against American involvement. Pro-government forces reached the center of Tikrit on March 31, and declared victory in the Tikrit campaign the following day.

The Tikrit offensive illustrates Iran’s footprint in the fight against IS: Iran has been able to capitalize on the U.S.’s limited willingness to commit to defeating the Islamic State, putting itself in a position to gain extraordinary influence as it pushes back IS. Shortly after IS’s June 2014 advance, Iran began sending its Revolutionary Guard troops—led by the head of Iran’s Quds force, General Qasem Soleimani, who is frequently photographed near the front lines—to fight against IS alongside the Iraqi security forces. Iranian-backed Shia militias have since taken a leading role against IS. To many Iraqis, Iran appears to be a more reliable partner against IS than the United States. One Iraqi commander commented that when Baghdad was threatened, the Iranians did not hesitate to help us, and contrasted Iran’s willingness to the Americans, who hesitated to help us…and to help our security forces.[8] Iran’s approach to IS has been one of slow, deliberate counterinsurgency, trying to present itself as a reliable partner for the Iraqi security forces.

IS’s capture of Ramadi. IS returned to the light and mobile tactics it employed in its first Anbar campaign when it captured the provincial capital of Ramadi in May 2015. In capturing Ramadi, IS was largely able to evade surveillance and airstrikes. The group conducted at least 27 vehicle-borne IED attacks during the offensive, including transforming captured U.S. military vehicles into megabombs. Given that the Sahwa movement originated in Ramadi, IS’s mass slaughter of Sunni tribesmen after its capture of the city was utterly predictable.

IED explosion in Ramadi, posted to

Twitter May 20, 2015.

Islamic State Social Media [For Public Distribtion]

IS’s capture of Ramadi illustrates some of the weaknesses of coalition efforts, namely the coalition’s lack of engagement with the Sunni tribes that—as previously discussed—had been critical to defeating IS’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq. In the current conflict, Iraq has dragged its heels with respect to arming or otherwise supporting the tribes, and the United States hasn’t seemed eager to engage at a substate level against the Iraqi government’s wishes. Indeed, prior to the fall of Ramadi, there were indications for at least eight months that IS might overrun the city, as well as grisly warnings about what the group would do should it capture Ramadi. This situation should have spurred the U.S. to step up its tribal engagement efforts—but the U.S. failed to do so, instead deferring to the Iraqi government’s suspicions of Sunni tribal power. The result is that the Sunni tribes could not counter IS’s advance on Ramadi, and ended up feeling betrayed once again by former benefactors, just as they felt slighted when they were not incorporated into Iraq’s security forces following the Sahwa’s success.

IS’s capture of Ramadi is indicative of the organization’s adaptations and continuing ability to mount successful offensives. However, contrary to the suggestion of some commentators, Ramadi does not represent merely the latest in an unbroken string of victories by IS. Since its apex from August through October 2014, IS has lost significant territory in Iraq, including the provinces of Diyala, Babil, and the majority of Salah al-Din—except for Sharqat district, where Bayji is being contested. In Syria, IS lost its battle for Kobani, and has also lost the districts of Tal Abyad and Ayn Issa in its capital of Raqqa.

In some ways, IS’s gains of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra can be seen as low-hanging fruit for the organization. The former had been under siege for a significant amount of time prior to IS’s actual takeover, while IS’s seizure of Palmyra occurred after a significant portion of the pro-regime forces defending the city had been pulled away due to rebel advances in other parts of Syria. The true test of the group’s capabilities will be whether it is able to maintain momentum and continue to control the territory that it has captured.

The Islamic State’s International Expansion

Used by permission of the Institute for the Study of War.

Even before its expulsion from al-Qaeda’s network, IS had been intent on garnering new affiliates subordinate to it. In late 2013, IS tried for the first time to feel out whether other al-Qaeda branches would be willing to switch their oaths of loyalty to IS emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. These entreaties became more explicit in May 2014, when IS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani publicly asked all of al-Qaeda’s branches to issue an official statement about IS and its approach to jihad. International expansion is highly advantageous to IS: This expansion leaves the impression that IS is a group that is on the rise, distracts from any losses it experiences in the Syria-Iraq theater, and demonstrates that IS is a global player.

The first major group to pledge allegiance to IS outside of the Syria-Iraq theater was the Sinai contingent of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM), an Egypt-based jihadist group previously associated with al-Qaeda that pledged bayat to IS on November 10, 2014. IS deployed emissaries to Egypt to help it secure ABM’s allegiance, and its efforts were aided by the fact that Egyptian security forces killed or captured ABM’s top-level leaders several times during the course of 2014—thus thinning out al-Qaeda loyalists within its ranks.

IS has also expanded into both Libya and Nigeria, with its growing activities in the former tied to its wooing of a major al-Qaeda affiliate in the latter country. In October 2014, a group of militants in the eastern Libyan city of Derna openly pledged bayat to IS. Soon after the pledge, IS flooded social media with videos and pictures of IS militants in Derna, including a video showing a parade of militants waving IS flags as they drove down a thoroughfare in the city. Though this imagery was able to convince news outlets like BBC and CNN that IS was in complete control of the city, this was never the case: Derna was in fact divided between a patchwork of militant factions, some of which opposed IS’s expansion into Libya. IS later made a more serious push to capture the city of Sirte, beginning in February 2015.

One reason behind IS’s push into Sirte appears to have been to impress the Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram with the vibrancy of the IS network in Africa, thus ameliorating its concerns that leaving al-Qaeda’s orbit would be costly. In this regard, it was successful: On March 7, Boko Haram released an audio recording pledging allegiance to IS.

IS remains focused on expanding into Africa. The eighth issue of the group’s English-language magazine Dabiq was suggestively titled Shari’ah Alone Will Rule Africa, with the cover displaying a photograph of the Great Mosque in the Tunisian city of Kairouan. But the group’s designs on expansion also extend far beyond Africa. IS’s affiliate in Yemen has been able to carry out several large-scale attacks since announcing its presence there in April 2015, and IS has also increasingly made noise about its presence in Afghanistan.

But IS’s international expansion has not always gone smoothly. Its aforementioned affiliate in the Libyan city of Derna ended up provoking some of the city’s more powerful militias when, as in June 2015, it killed Salim Darbi, the commander of the Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade and the head of the Derna Mujahedin Shura Council (DMSC). In response, the DMSC launched an offensive to oust the Islamic State from the city. The DMSC defeated the group in most of Derna, confining the Islamic State to limited areas in and around the city. Similarly, IS’s Algerian branch, Jund al-Khalifa, significantly declined from December 2014 through May 2015. In December 2014, the Algerian army killed Jund al-Khalifa’s commander Gouri Abdelmalek and two other militants in a raid in the Boumerdès region east of Algiers. An even deadlier blow came in May 2015, when Algerian security forces launched a large-scale operation against a high-level meeting of Jund al-Khilafa militants in the Bouira region. The Algerian operation not only killed about two dozen fighters at minimum—over half of Jund al-Khalifa’s ranks—but also new emir Abdullah Othman al-Asimi and five of Jund al-Khilafa’s six military commanders. Algerian security forces also killed three more Jund al-Khilafa fighters the following day. This operation imposed significant attrition on IS’s Algerian branch at both the leadership and foot soldier levels. But despite these setbacks, international expansion will remain a key part of IS’s strategy.

Conclusion

IS’s June 2014 offensive is almost certainly the most brilliant military advance ever made by a violent non-state actor. Since then, IS has experienced both gains and setbacks, capturing significant territory in some areas, while losing ground in others.

Over the long term, IS possesses several significant weaknesses. One important weakness is the group’s overt brutality, which risks sparking a significant local backlash in the same way that Zarqawi’s heavy-handedness did. But even more significant, the dangers of fighting a multi-front war are fundamental to military strategy, and IS has done nothing but surround itself with enemies. As previously noted, after IS’s blitzkrieg into Iraq, the group almost immediately betrayed its partners, opened a new front against the Kurds in northern Iraq, and mounted a genocidal campaign against the Yazidis. Most recently, IS managed to drag in Turkey, a country that had previously confined its role to the sidelines. Because IS has put itself in a position where it is perpetually at war on all sides, the group needs to attract a constant flow of recruits—and thus needs to maintain the appearance that it has momentum.

But these weaknesses do not spell inevitable defeat for IS. The group may have entrenched itself enough in Syria and Iraq, and its opponents may have shown themselves ineffective enough at governing territory, to ensure IS’s long-term survival in that theater. Moreover, IS’s international expansion may allow the group to continue to pose a threat across multiple countries even if it experiences significant setbacks in the Syria-Iraq theater.

Overall, IS demonstrates how dramatically the gap between nation-states and VNSAs has narrowed—even when the world’s most powerful countries are involved in trying to defeat a VNSA. Other VNSAs have been watching how this struggle plays out, and we are sure to hear from some of them soon.

Introduction:

Global Radical Islamist Insurgency— Al Qaeda and Islamic State Networks Focus

Robert J. Bunker and Dave Dilegge

Claremont, CA and Largo, FL

October 2015

This anthology—the second of an initial two volume set—specifically covers Small Wars Journal writings on Al Qaeda and the Islamic State spanning the years 2012-2014. This set is meant to contribute to U.S. security debates focusing on radical Islamist global insurgency by collecting diverse SWJ essays into more easily accessible formats. Small Wars Journal has long been a leader in insurgency and counterinsurgency research and scholarship with an emphasis on practical applications and policy outcomes in furtherance of U.S. global and allied nation strategic interests. The site is able to lay claim to supporting the writings of many COIN (counterinsurgency) practitioners. This includes Dr. David Kilcullen whose early work dating from late 2004 Countering Global Insurgency helped to lay much of the conceptual basis focusing on this threat and as a result greatly helped to facilitate the writings that were later incorporated into these Al Qaeda and Islamic State focused anthologies.[1]

This volume is composed of sixty-six chapters divided into sections on a) radical Islamist OPFORs (opposition forces) and context and b) U.S.—allied policy and counter radical Islamist strategies. The work also contains a preface, foreword, this introduction, a postscript, an extensive notes section, and editor and contributor biographies on sixty-four individuals as well as an acronyms listing and an initial ‘About SWJ’ and foundation section.

The preface by Matt Begert, a retired Marine Lt.Col. with SO/LIC and aviation expertise, provides a deft overview of how this volume of the anthology set, its linkages to concepts related to The Small Wars Manual, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Boyd, and McRaven, portrays how the global radical Islamist insurgency appears to be intensifying. The foreword by Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an Islamic State specialist, and Bridget Moreng, an analyst at Valens Global focusing on militant organizations in the Middle East and North Africa, specifically addresses the historic rise and misrule of the entities composing the future Islamic State since the 1999 period. The historical narrative begins with the early years of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a bloodthirsty street thug, and continues to the present day beheadings, immolations, and other forms of execution of perceived apostates and non-believers who are seen as enemies to the establishment of a cult-based vision of a post-apocalyptic Sunni Islamic caliphate. Finally, the postscript entitled the The Criminal Caliphate by Dr. Paul Rexton Kan, a professor with the U.S. Army War College, looks at how the old revolutionary ‘propaganda by the deed’ has now morphed into a newer form of radical Islamist ‘propaganda by the crime.’ He focuses on Islamic State, Al Nustra, and Boko Haram involvement with sex trafficking, oil smuggling, extortion, and jail breaks and prison riots and how the convergence and/or entanglement of terrorism and insurgency with criminal activities is challenging the conventional wisdom of both scholars and practitioners alike.

The lead anthology essay by William Thompson, who at the time of the initial publication of that piece in January 2012, was a Masters candidate at Harvard University specializing in International Relations. He looks at the concept of comparative advantage as it relates to criminal organizations fighting over the drug trade in Afghanistan. These organizations are not only symptomatic of failed states, such as Afghanistan, but have incentives to ensure further state failure. This work is contextually embedded within international political economy (IPE) studies, however—unlike formal IPE analysis—draws upon the informal and illicit market mechanisms that are in play. The concluding essay, chapter sixty-six, by Nathan White, a Department of Defense Civilian Research Fellow with the Center for Complex Operations (CCO) at the National Defense University and a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London, was initially published in December 2014. The work focuses upon the United State’s inability to apply whole of government strategies against the Islamic State. It specifically addresses three mutually reinforcing governmental institutional deficiencies—1) a failure to properly conceptualize the nature of strategy in war; 2) a national security system that is poorly structured for whole-of-government campaign strategy management; and 3), a resulting inability of U.S. Government agencies to coordinate in the field for strategic impact. The work then goes on to provide recommendations to address these deficiencies, which appear to have gone unheeded given the present situation in Syria and Iraq as of the writing of this anthology introduction.

Essays of note between the initial and final chapters of this anthology include the numerous contributions provided by Gary Anderson, retired Marine Col. and adjunct professor at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and Youssef Aboul-Enein, U.S. Navy Commander and part time faculty with the National Intelligence University and National Defense University, who have both been staunch supporters of Small Wars Journal over the course of many years. Anderson’s work on emerging forms of terrorism, insurgency, and conflict and Aboul-Enein’s scholarship on radical Islamist thought related to Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are both well known and highly respected within the U.S defense policy community. Further, chapter twenty-nine on the 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Kenya by Al Shabaab by Dr. Herman Rujumba Butime, who obtained his Ph.D. in Terrorism Studies from the University of Wollongong in Australia, is of great interest. The work discusses how both the layout of that mall shaped the attack and the Kenyan security force response. Such ‘environmental design’ concerns are of significance to homeland security and counterterrorism professionals in the United States because of the threat potentials of a similar an attack taking place against one or more of the major American malls found throughout the our nation. The entire policy response and counter strategies section of the anthology—spanning chapters forty-four through sixty-six—is also of immense importance because some of the best U.S. and allied state thinkers have provided a wealth of insights and ideas on how global radical Islam can be mitigated, contained, and ultimately neutralized.

With these thoughts in mind, the editors of this anthology are very proud to present it to you the reader. Depending on reader interest and both the quality and quantity of Small Wars Journal submissions in 2015 and beyond, a third edition of this set may at some future point be published. It should be mentioned that in creating the initial two volumes, spanning 2007-2011 and 2012-2014 respectively, we the editors have witnessed quite a bit of network expansion from the initial Al Qaeda form into what may have become the probable Islamic State successor form—however, the original Al Qaeda mother cells are by no means extinguished. They are, in fact, fighting back against the Islamic State on the ground in direct force-on-force engagements spanning a number of continents and are also waging cyberspace offensives in their online magazines and in numerous social media sites. How this global radical Islamist insurgent network may evolve or devolve is at this point anyone’s ultimate guess. Outcomes range from the actual demise of Al Qaeda and total Islamic State network domination to seeing some form of ongoing civil war between weakened Al Qaeda and the Islamic State factions or possibly even the rise of a new network form developing out of the Islamic State or an affiliated component of it.

Of concern, of course, is that each network evolution appears to be deadlier than its predecessor just as most of us currently agree that the Islamic State is proving itself to be more dangerous and capable than Al Qaeda has ever been. What is startling about this perception is that it is being held with the full knowledge that it was Al Qaeda—not the Islamic State—which engaged in the 9/11 attacks and, to date, Al Qaeda has thus been the far more successful terrorist organization in terms of direct attacks against the West. What Al Qaeda has never had, however, is the ability to generate state-like power with large scale forces, seize territory as the Islamic State has with millions of people under its direct rule, and directly draw so many new recruits from the Western World on such an ongoing basis. Hence, if allowed to grow and consolidate, the Islamic State has the potential to do far more damage to the West via terrorist attacks than Al Qaeda has ever done.

Radical Islamist OPFORs (Opposition Forces) and Context

Chapter 1:

Criminal Organizations, Competitive Advantage and State Failure in Afghanistan

William Thompson

First Published January 11, 2012

The last fifty years has seen an ever increasing number of both intrastate wars and failed states. Although many explanations for this have been proffered few have attempted an international political economic (IPE) analysis, which given the impact of the illicit international economy on intrastate conflicts and failed states is a sad commentary on the focus of the resurgent subject of international political economy.[1] This is especially true when one examines a situation such as Afghanistan; a state that has not experienced peace for nearly forty years, and suffers from a conflict spurred on by criminal organizations, and armed groups partaking in international drug trafficking.

But how can IPE assist in explaining these events? One way is through the application of Michael Porter’s theory of comparative advantage to various aspects of violence, including causes. Competitive advantage suggests that performance can only be created by creating a sustainable pricing advantage, as Michael Porter wrote in his book Competitive Advantage: competitive advantage grows fundamentally from the value a firm is able to create…value is what buyers are willing to pay, and superior value stems from offering lower prices than competitors for equivalent benefits or providing unique benefits that more than offset higher prices.[2]

When applied to various security problems the significance of the idea becomes apparent. For example a country with natural resources has an obvious competitive advantage in that resource, a competitive advantage so great in fact that people are willing to fight over the disproportionately rich revenue streams derived from leveraging that advantage. This is in essence the resource curse often discussed in regards to oil producing countries engaged in intrastate warfare, such as in Angola.[3] But it can be applied in other cases as well, for example diamonds can be found in many places throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo, the country poses a natural competitive advantage in diamond production.

The result of this competitive advantage is a scramble by various armed groups for control over the resource, because, save the cost of labor, the country poses almost an infinite competitive advantage over countries that do not possess abundant diamond supplies. This in turn means that control of resource can earn armed groups a significant revenue source. In the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo this rush for control of the diamond supply has in part helped fuel intrastate violence for the last thirty years or so.

In today’s developing world a significant and growing problem is failed states. Failed states are states that can no longer provide their people with positive political goods.[4] In many explanations of failed states transnational organized crime taking advantage of natural competitive advantages (such as diamonds and oil) are seen as a result of state failure, and not part of the cause of state failure, which is seen as primarily a political issue.[5] This paper proposes instead that transnational organized crime is in fact one of the causes of state failure, not