by Jack Murphy
This is nothing new. Most of the insurgent small-arms fire aimed at American forces in Iraq tended to go high, and buttstocks often were removed from AKs. There is a belief among some Muslim fighters that preparation or even marksmanship practice is impious, that it is a sign of a lack of faith that Allah will make them victorious. As such, there is a tendency to “spray and pray,” in a very literal sense.
If their individual tactics are so sloppy, how have they been so successful in recent months? Their operational-level sophistication has had a great deal to do with it, especially the use of terror and the courting of disaffected Sunni groups in the north. The other factor is, of course, the level of opponents they have been facing.
While ISIS has fought the Assad regime in Syria, the majority of frontline fighting has until recently been done by the Islamic Front and Jabhat al-Nusra. In Iraq, their primary adversaries have been the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish peshmerga. The Iraqi Army almost immediately dissolved in the face of ISIS’s advance in June. The peshmerga, while generally considered better fighters than their southern Arab neighbors, are a mountain militia, not an army. They have little in the way of heavy weapons, no armor to speak of, and their go-to strategy (which has kept them from being wiped out more than once) is, When it starts to look really bad, head for the hills.
As much as the Kurds have steadfastly refused to cower in the face of Islamists or anyone else, they were ill equipped to deal with ISIS and were being pushed back, no matter how hard they thumped their chests (the Kurds do a lot of that). It was air support, and munitions being finally delivered that Maliki had sat on and refused to pass on to the Kurds, that turned the tide and enabled the peshmerga to break out and push ISIS back south, eventually retaking Mosul Dam and more territory to the south.
The Iraqi Army situation is more complicated than the peshmerga situation. Instilling military professionalism in the Iraqi Army has been a near-impossible task for the last eleven years. Of course there are always exceptions, the officers or soldiers who genuinely care about their country and about being good soldiers, but the majority have been about as militarily competent as the terrorists. There are several reasons for this, some political, some cultural.
Politically, the Shi’a-dominated Maliki government had become so corrupt, and so sectarian, that the Sunnis serving in the Iraqi Army didn’t feel that they owed the Baghdad government anything anymore. ISIS might be made up of bastards, but they were at least Sunni bastards. So why should Sunni soldiers die fighting other Sunnis for a Shi’a government that had put them down for years? Similarly, the Shi’a soldiers didn’t see the point of fighting and dying for Sunni towns. In a recent interview, an Iraqi Army officer states that while the Iraqi Army under Saddam was held together by fear of Saddam, it is now fractured by competing political, sectarian, and tribal loyalties.27
Culturally, this is a problem that most Arab armies have faced, and few, if any, have overcome. In the country briefings before deploying U.S. soldiers to Iraq, it was outlined how the local loyalties go family, faith, clan, tribe, and then, somewhere along the line, country. This applies to their soldiers just as much as to the everyday civilians living out in the cities and villages. Without loyalty to much of anything beyond sect and tribe, no fighting unit is going to hold together.
It’s been said that Arabs are, by and large, “amoral familialists,” that they don’t form solid bonds with anyone who is not a blood relation (again, as with all cultural and political generalizations, there are exceptions). Since most units are not made up of one single tribe, there goes unit cohesion. If things are going well, it still manages to muddle through. As soon as things start to go south, however, such as your leadership bugging out ahead of anywhere between four hundred and fifteen hundred ISIS fighters in pickup trucks28, it becomes, “Screw this, I’m not dying for these assholes, I’m out of here!”29
In summation, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham has managed to apply time-tested lessons of guerrilla warfare, terror, and maneuver warfare in order to capitalize on the particular political and cultural weaknesses of its enemies in the region. Although the individual fighters might not measure up from a purely military perspective, the organization’s operational and strategic acumen has managed to make up for its ground-level weaknesses to make it the most formidable threat in the Middle East today.
Chapter 2. A Forensic Look at the ISIS Organizational Structure
The battles are many, and the names used are varied. But the goal is one: a Crusader-Rafidite [Shi’a] war against the Sunnis.
—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
Make no mistake, we are fighting a religious war.
—U.S. Army chaplain, Mosul, September 11, 2005
(Lang SOFREP.com)
Origins and Organizational Structure
The origins of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, formal name ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyyah) have roots in Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and Al Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) failures in securing the nation of Iraq as a bedrock for Salafist militancy. These organizations were largely the genesis of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a central thought leader following his activities in Pakistan. Zarqawi’s scale of influence both strategically and operationally is debatable within the intelligence community, but within the open source realm, as well as the group’s own propaganda, he remains at the forefront of both Jama’at al-Tawhid and AQI historical narratives. Following Zarqawi’s death in June 2006, AQI transitioned its name to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), seeking to nominally distance itself from the larger Al Qaeda (AQ) organization and appeal primarily to the local Sunni minority groups. This distance was nominal in light of the ISI’s leadership under Abu Ayyub al-Masri, a key member of AQ. Following al-Masri’s death in 2010, the organization continued to operate primarily in Northern Iraq and through cross-border efforts from Syria with facilitation from Iran.30 ISIL eventually arose from the merging of fighters within Syria and AQI members that had crossed into Syria.
Rhizomes
ISIL’s organizational structure is well built and reflects the transition from a series of small groups under a nominal umbrella to a cohesive organization with clear objectives and intent. The group has structured leadership and reflects a series of business processes as functional components of an operational organization seeking results from its militant activities on the ground. Nevertheless, it is in a constant state of flux, particularly as it attempts to fill the governance void in Iraq. Abstractly, the best representation of ISIL is a rhizomatic organization as articulated by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In botany, rhizomes are underground stems of a plant with roots that extend from its core. Deleuze and Guattari explain concepts outside of a strict linear definition that reflected botany’s rhizomes:
As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of “things” and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those “things.” A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by “ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”31
ISIL’s leadership respects and notes its origins (particularly via its propaganda) but is less concerned with history than with the inputs and outputs of its current existence. It is a nonlinear organization that has a degree of centrality derived from function and sociocultural discrimination as related to Islam, nationality, and experience within the Salafist community. However, this is not the sum of its parts. Despite ISIS’s structured top-tier leadership, its holistic structure is very nonlinear, lending itself to the nature of mutualism that is characteristic of rhizomatic entities. The organization seeks agility and fluidity, and integrates and separates people and qualities based on their utility in relation to organizational growth. In the future, were the organization to diminish in size, it would simply adopt a different format. Much like
the origins of ISIL are in Jama’at al-Tawhid and AQI, ISIL will continue to attempt to survive and grow.
This abstract model is key in characterizing ISIL and in dispelling paradigms that reject exclusionary hypotheses. Examples: The Sunni-Shi’a divide prevents Iran as well as Bashar al-Assad from facilitating ISIL. ISIL will not accept assistance from the People’s Republic of China. ISIL and AQ are existentially at odds. Since it is impossible to prove a negative, any logical analysis of the group should begin with a degree of scientific positivism that inductively conceptualizes every one of these possibilities. In fact, there is evidence that Iran has in the past and currently facilitates Al Qaeda, as noted by the U.S. Rewards for Justice program’s Wanted note on Yasin al-Suri.32 Since we can conclude that some members of ISIL are former members of AQI or ISI, it logically follows that Yasin al-Suri will conditionally assist ISIL. Additionally, and speculatively, Assad may receive a percentage of revenue from the sale of illicit black market oil sold by ISIL to fund its own operations. Further, as Musa al-Gharbi argues, drawing the United States into the conflict in fact substantiates Zarqawi’s claims of a Western-Shi’a conspiracy to kill Sunnis.33 In order to survive, ISIL’s leadership will evaluate any and all opportunities in relation to their mid- and long-term goals.
Finally, the nature of this model is particularly relevant when considered in parallel with noted Syrian Abu Musab al-Suri’s long-standing strategy of the open front jihad as outlined in his two-volume The Global Islamic Resistance Call. Al-Suri discusses Islamic jihad from 1963 until 2001, defining most of these efforts as military failures. He particularly notes that a large portion of this failure was the result of the regional, secret, and hierarchical nature of the movements. Much as rhizomes should be considered a modern construct befitting our age of information propagation, al-Suri argues that “times have changed and we must design a method of confrontation, which is in accordance with the standards of the present time.” His well-argued solution is the jihad at open fronts belonging to the “whole Islamic nation.” In the section “The Military Theory of the Global Islamic Resistance Cell,” he notes,
The conclusion which we have arrived at now, is: That the basic axis (al-mihwar al-asasi) of the Resistance’s military activity against America and her allies now, must lie within the framework of “light guerrilla warfare,” “civilian terror” (al-irhab al madani) and secret methods, especially on the level of individual operations and small Resistance Units completely and totally separated from each other. However. along with this I say: Any alteration of the balance of power in favor of the Resistance and the jihad, which minimizes the effects of American control in areas which fulfills the requirements of the Open Fronts, which I will present, will again make the issue of open confrontation for the purpose of liberating land, settling on it, and establishing the starting points or seeds for a legal and political entity for the Islamic power, a goal that one must pursue whenever the opportunities arise.34
The discussion of rhizomes and open front can appear both confusing and rife with cognitive dissonance when viewed by Western eyes, particularly as ISIL transitions from rhizome to state construct. However, within the cultural paradigm of the Middle East, this is not unusual. It is a typical occurrence in political, social, and family life. The key idea to take from this is that it is difficult to characterize ISIL as a static snapshot in time; it should be viewed as an evolving organism striving to survive. Most important, it is a human-driven organism where not all decisions are logical, but all decisions are rational within the rational choice theory of international relations. If ISIL is indeed following the strategy of open fronts, as it appears to be, then our answer should be to assess it as a rhizomatic entity. As of this writing, it would then appear that ISIL has liberated land, settled on it, and begun sowing the seeds for transition to an Islamic power.
Structure
In the future, ISIL’s structure will likely reflect the older organizational structure of caliphates, specifically that of the Umayyad Caliphate, with conditional modifications to more closely align itself with contemporary Salafist ideology. This is supported by evidence of a structure growing within the existing rhizomatic nature of the group as told by notebooks found in Yemen of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) own carefully constructed plans for building a caliphate35. Although the groups are distinct, the cross-pollination of ideas is not unusual in the melting pot of online forums and transitions of fighters from one group to another. Thus we can expect to see “emirs” or “walis” correspondent to their function within the organization. An example of this is outlined at Caliphate Online, a blog whose only author is listed as AK and notes his location as the UK.36 The author has created an organizational structure reminiscent of the structure the intelligence community has noted in AQI prior to its evolution into ISIL. The overarching control of ISIL as it becomes less agile will likely be in the form of a governing body with a head of state that retains a significant amount of control but shares this control with a house of representatives.
This body will be an amalgamation of parliamentary monarchy and theocratic presidential authoritarianism. It is unlikely that ISIL will allow the election of their leader but may concede the need for representation as long as there is a sharia-style framework of laws to enforce Salafist ideals, thus creating an artifice of representation for its constituency. With the establishment of this leadership, it will template infrastructure based on ministries that reflect governance. If ISIL is successful, it is possible that the government of Iraq (GOI) will be absorbed and restructured to reflect ISIL’s idea of a caliphate as the easiest road toward a new government. To understand what this government will look like, one needs only look at the current structure of the GOI and note where modifications can be made to increase and consolidate power under the caliph.
Currently, the core of the ISIL organization probably looks much like a war cabinet, still retaining emirs as titular heads of components of the network, with no service components or unified combatant command leadership. However, it likely has a director or directors, joint chiefs of staff, military intelligence, weapons procurement, and regional commands. It stands to reason that the same is true for logistics and finance. Each of these may have the appointment of an emir.
In summary, there are certainly core elements to this leadership that are appointed based on experience or Islamic credentials or a mixture of both. However, as the organization is traced out to its operational components, the lines of command and control become less clear. The outermost nodes of this network still very much align themselves along the open front strategy: fighting and bargaining with opponents and allies to gain as much as advantage as possible. Successes and failures are then reported upward to the core. Much of the West’s existing knowledge of the leadership is based on media sensationalizing or isolating key figures. This is a true representation not of the structure of the group but rather of facets of the organization that have distinguished themselves enough to be noticed.
Institutionalization and Consolidation
Institutionalization and consolidation is an issue Eric Selbin identifies in his book Modern Latin American Revolutions. Selbin uses institutionalization and consolidation as mechanisms for social revolutionary processes. He applies this to Socialist revolutions, but this problem also applies to ISIL if it expects to succeed. In essence, they are two problems that ISIL must overcome to effectively transition from a rhizomatic entity to a state. According to Selbin, institutionalization and consolidation are two paths revolutions should follow in the period following political victory.37 If ISIL does indeed succeed at the land war in Iraq and declares victory, this is not the end of its struggles. It will have an extremely limited amount of time to begin to accomplish the duties of a state. It must demonstrate the ability to transfer political power from the previous government (the GOI) to its own political structure.
Consolidation is fundamentally the support of the population. The clichéd term “hear
ts and minds” is a double-edged sword. Once ISIL establishes itself as the governing body of Iraq, it can no longer rely only on fear to coerce the populace into support. In order to maintain any longevity, it will require the participation of the population to execute the duties of a state that it has struggled to establish. The constituency of ISIL will need to go to work at state and commercial workplaces to begin the process of rebuilding Iraq. Unless it shores up support for its regime, ISIL will quickly find itself at the pointy end of the spear of a dissenting group that has splintered away due to its dissatisfaction with the manner in which ISIL governs. Even if this consolidation occurs in the short term, without active participation in the process itself and without a vested belief in a future that includes their needs, the citizens of this new Iraq will rebel against any government ISIL erects.
ISIL will also need to institutionalize its process. In other words, ISIL will have to identify its ideological framework and transition it into facets of governance. How will it provide health care? What sort of system of education will it have? How will the public works function? These are just some questions among many that will need to be answered. In light of these questions, ISIL will need to retain its ideology or else risk compromising its core tenets by satisfying the demands of a constituency. Thus far, it seems unlikely that ISIL will compromise its core tenets. Unlike groups in the past, ISIL has thus far relied on a self-declared vision of a brighter future for all Muslims who fit into the Salafist mold. If it cannot actually run the institutions of state in that mold, it is just as unlikely to succeed as if it does not consolidate popular support.
