Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State

Abstract

The legend of the Iraq Surge, and its corresponding and interrelated twin, the Sunni Awakening (Sahwa in Arabic), is firmly ensconced in US military lore. In fact, the Awakening part is often left out. For example, General David Petraeus, the commander of this military campaign who ably turned around a failing effort, recently described it this way: “coalition and Iraqi forces largely destroyed al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISIS’ forerunner) and the associated Sunni insurgent groups, killing or capturing key leaders, promoting reconciliation with many of the rank and file members, and driving the groups out of their key strongholds in the Sunni areas of Iraq.”1 The general goes on to say that despite this clear victory, a variety of factors that occurred “after late 2011,” meaning after the United States left, caused the return of the Islamic State (as ISIS is known today) in a new, more potent form.Considering that the Islamic State captured Fallujah, a city just sixty kilometers from Baghdad, just two years later, in December 2013, any circumspection about the true impact of the Surge/Awakening period is welcome. Thankfully, Carter Malkasian has done just this in his newest book, Illusions of Victory. The title infers that this civilian counterinsurgency advisor with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has a slight quibble with the legend of the Surge.Interestingly, Malkasian was not in Iraq during the Surge, and did not witness either the Awakening or the US military campaign that significantly reduced violence in the country by the end of 2007. He had spent three tours with the US Marines in Anbar province prior to leaving in August of 2006 and heading to Afghanistan in 2007 to help advise Provincial Reconstruction Teams. He wrote his award-winning book, War Comes to Garmser, based on observations from that experience. This makes his latest effort even more impressive, as he missed the defeat of al- Qaʿida in Iraq/Islamic State of Iraq in 2006–7—and yet writes so clearly about it. His depth of knowledge of the tribes of Anbar, combined with his ability to contrast the Awakening phenomena with the local dynamics in another complex insurgency in Afghanistan, makes him an astute and influential messenger.Malkasian's narrative is that much of what we believe about how this tribal uprising helped the United States defeat the al-Qaʿida–affiliated jihadis is understandable, but wrong. Malkasian's argument has three parts. First, the Sunni Awakening was not simply a tribal backlash against a violent al-Qaʿida in Iraq, which killed, raped, and intermarried without the appropriate permission. Instead, the rebellion was much more about the incompatibility of Zarqawi's unique brand of hegemonic Islamism with tribal political power structures. Second, the tribal leaders’ alliance against the burgeoning and transforming Islamic State in Iraq could not stand up to the powerful group without help from the United States—a move that would cause its own future problems in a population that largely had a fixed negative opinion about the American occupier and its Iraqi allies. Finally, Malkasian argues that the thinness of tribal support for the Awakening should have served as an indication that the early incarnations of the Islamic State had more popular support than people understood at the time. It was this support that allowed the jihadists to survive/bide time until the end of the American occupation, after which they could begin expanding their reach once again.It is worth expanding on this three-part thesis in more detail. The origins of the split between the nascent Islamic State of Iraq at the time and Sunni tribal and resistance group leaders was largely about political and economic issues. Tribal autonomy and control of smuggling routes came under threat as the Islamic State's forerunner tightened its grip on Anbar province. Political tensions surged as resistance group leaders saw the transition to a caliphate-in-waiting as a direct threat to their own political ambitions. In what can be described as a true grassroots movement, the tribes and significant elements from the nationalist-themed resistance groups formed an alliance to fight back against the Islamic State's growing hegemony. This pressure from below, in addition to the sudden contestation of sanctuary and core areas, caused problems for the jihadis just as Surge brigades arrived to root them out of rural areas outside of Baghdad. The combination of American conventional forces and the tribal/former resistance auxiliaries benefited from impeccable timing and exceptional intelligence about Islamic State activities, forcing the jihadis to retreat deeper into inaccessible areas and the desert.The leaders of this uprising were not the powerful sheikhs, since most were not in Iraq anymore due to the insecurity, but rural, lower-ranking sheikhs who were ambitious and willing to take risks to accrue more power for their clan or tribe. ʿAbdul Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the Awakening movement, was from a small tribe and had the humorous nickname of “the highway robber” because of his tribe's historic involvement in running an extensive contraband network. Al-Qaʿida in Iraq had killed his father and brother for suggesting reconciliation with the government—probably to get jobs for the tribes—and Abu Risha was unrivaled in his total commitment to the uprising, in a way that very few of his peers were. With the defeat of the seemingly unstoppable al-Qaʿida franchise, the Awakening movement moved into Sunni provincial politics and tried to translate their burgeoning power into something more lasting.You don't need to read Malkasian's book to know that they failed in this endeavor. One of the reasons the Awakening sheikhs had trouble gaining popular support was their reliance on the occupying power and an Iraqi government widely suspected of being controlled by outside agents (specifically the Iranians), and determined to marginalize Sunnis in Anbar and elsewhere in payment for past wrongs. Regardless of the accuracy of this perception, it nonetheless had some resonance with the residents of the almost completely Sunni province. My investigation of the Islamic State's plan to roll back the Sahwa movement between 2008 and 2013 revealed a strong emphasis in its propaganda of the Sahwa as “race traitors”— the idea that working with infidels and apostates against fellow Sunni Arabs dishonored the tribe/clan/family. Malkasian doesn't mention this campaign in the book, but as a student of local social dynamics he intuitively and convincingly argued that distaste for collaboration was a key vulnerability for the Sahwa.2 In a telling event, Sahwa founder Abu Risha was assassinated by a relative on his own property on the one-year anniversary of the Awakening announcement. The Islamic State of Iraq proudly claimed the killing as the start of its own counter-Awakening campaign.The idea that the Islamic State of Iraq had more public support than most thought in 2007 might be the least supportable, yet most intriguing, conclusion presented by Malkasian, yet I find it to be the most compelling. The resiliency on display by the early Islamic State—the group's ability to spring back to life in a short period after its punishment during the Surge—should give us all pause. According to some analysts, government arrests of highly visible Sunni politicians and the killing of dozens of protesters in Hawija contributed to a groundswell of antigovernment protest in 2013 that was hijacked by an opportunistic Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). As attractive as this connection might seem, it widely misses the mark by underestimating the growing strength of the Islamic State movement before large cities started falling in 2013. A closer look at Islamic State attack patterns in 2012 and 2013, particularly in Mosul, paints a much clearer picture for us. By the time Mosul fell in 2014, the Islamic State had successfully executed a long attritional campaign against the tribal Awakening and the Iraqi Security Forces that culminated in 2014 with the fall of Mosul and many other cities.If the author's thesis is controversial, the lessons he tries to impart to us about what this all means are very conventional. Malkasian uses the story of the Awakening and the rise of the Islamic State as a vehicle to pass on a series of combined observations from his field experience in both conflict zones. While powerful countries like the United States have the ability to upend certain regimes, the attempt to execute large-scale transformations of these same polities would require a great deal of time and effort, and even then had a low probability of success. The challenges in Afghanistan and Iraq were exacerbated by successive American administrations whose policies mandated unrealistically reduced efforts that were unable to achieve outsized results. In the future, if there are interventions such as those we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should expect to achieve modest political outcomes that are incremental, not transformational.Illusions of Victory is a brief, detailed, and very readable book even for nonspecialists on the conflict. It contains a mix of personal observations and thorough research into existing accounts of the Awakening. Malkasian is complimentary of the US military for its skill and agility in midwifing the Awakening in the midst of a ferocious and complex civil war, even as he admits that its military tactics probably played a lesser role in success or failure than originally thought (or claimed) since. Simply put, the rise of the Islamic State was largely due to the impermanence of the security gains of 2007–8.Malkasian's account also differs from previous works on the Awakening in that he presents the al-Qaʿida in Iraq/Islamic State's perspective on fighting the Awakening.3 In a conflict between multiple actors, the Islamic State's perspective on dealing with the Awakening has yet to receive significant scholarly attention and overall, we are still lacking a complete understanding of the Islamic State's rise. Malkasian offers three underappreciated reasons as to why the Awakening could not produce a sustained political project, and I would offer a fourth. The Islamic State is considered mainly a military force, a terrorist group on steroids. The group is rarely viewed as a political actor trying to develop popular support for its larger political project—the creation of a caliphate that worships according to the prophetic method, as they describe it.The Awakening was also a political actor, yet its coalition partners refused to see the group as such, and in fact forbade leaders of the Awakening from being involved in political activities. The Americans viewed their tribal/former resistance auxiliaries as temporary security partners that would be phased out with a vague promise of some sort of transition to other work.4 In reality, Awakening leaders frequently became mayors, police chiefs, and city council members—demonstrating that they were always striving to fill the tremendous governance gap that existed in Anbar and other Sunni majority provinces after 2007. The failure to support Awakening efforts to become a viable political force in Sunni Iraq left a void that was eventually filled by the Islamic State—whose adept coalition-building skills and focus on governance was remarkable in the period of the so-called caliphate. The critical need to develop a functioning Sunni polity in areas over which the government has limited control must be addressed by the Iraqi government and its partners in the aftermath of the caliphate's collapse.