The Islamic State’s smattering of remaining strongholds in Iraq and Syria are under siege. At the height of the self-declared caliphate’s power in mid-2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men controlled large swaths of both countries. Today, the jihadists hold only a few towns straddling the Iraqi-Syrian border. The U.S. military announced this week that Iraqi forces are advancing on the group’s positions in western Anbar Province, where Baghdadi’s loyalists are clinging to the rump of their once-expansive “nation.” Two competing coalitions—one backed by the United States, the other sponsored by Russia and Iran—have encircled what’s left of the gang’s forces just across the border in Syria.
Baghdadi’s erstwhile grandiose territorial ambitions now look somewhat pathetic. Whereas Baghdadi’s subordinates initially claimed to rule over a “remaining and expanding” empire, they now swear that this ongoing war was always predestined—a divinely mandated test of their followers’ will to wage jihad. The most ardent believers will not question this change in narrative. But not all of the faithful will be so pliable.
Some jihadist ideologues had predicted from the beginning that the Islamic State’s caliphate project was doomed to fail. One of them, in particular, now appears prophetic: Osama bin Laden.
On November 1, the CIA released a massive cache of documents and files taken from bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound when the terrorist leader was killed on May 2, 2011. The history of the Iraq war, and al Qaeda’s role in it, will have to be rewritten. Before Baghdadi’s group mushroomed into an international menace, it was a part of al Qaeda’s global network. Many of the files deal with the Islamic State’s predecessor organizations, revealing new details about their operations and intentions.
Bin Laden saw the Iraq war as a golden opportunity to expand the jihadists’ base. And al Qaeda wanted to build a new nation, governed according to strict Islamic law (sharia), on the vestiges of Saddam Hussein’s neo-Stalinist state. The al Qaeda founder warned that declaring a caliphate would be premature, however, as the United States remained powerful enough to easily topple any radical, sharia-based state. Still, the Abbottabad files make it clear that al Qaeda’s senior leaders helped guide the jihad in Iraq years after the 2003 invasion and create the franchise that eventually blossomed into the Islamic State.
The current Islamic State evolved out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi. One audio file recovered in Abbottabad contains a lengthy biography of Zarqawi, recorded by a jihadist who served alongside him, a man known as Abu Muhammad. Zarqawi set up operations inside Iraq before the war, according to Abu Muhammad’s testimony. Shortly after the conflict began, Zarqawi relocated to Mosul, staying in the city for three months before moving on. Mosul would become one of the two most important cities in the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate. It was overrun by Baghdadi’s men in the summer of 2014 and was not liberated from their clutches until 2017.
Zarqawi and his men faced numerous hurdles from the start. Chief among them: The Americans and their allies sought to divide Al Qaeda in Iraq from other insurgent factions. One newly released memo contains detailed instructions for combating the American plans. It is not clear who wrote the memo or who received it, but it seems to have been written sometime in 2005. According to U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the document, it foreshadows the creation of the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), the union of Al Qaeda in Iraq and five other Iraqi insurgent groups, in early 2006.
The al Qaeda author began by likening the Iraqi insurgent groups to children with “one father” but “many mothers.” “The common connection between all of these fighters is that they have refused the infidel occupation,” he elaborated. But they have “different opinions, approaches, and visions” for the fight, from those who want to resurrect Iraq’s Baathist regime (a “few fighters”) to those who “fight to make God’s Supreme Word, and make Islam the only religion, and make the Mesopotamia the base that will lead to liberate the rest of the Muslim occupied countries.” This latter category included Zarqawi’s al Qaeda branch, as well as another al Qaeda-linked group in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah.
When the memo was written, presumably in late 2005, the jihadists’ enemies were looking to capitalize on their differences. The author had a solution. He endorsed a plan to create “a council” of “leaders and scholars, so they can meet and agree on the fundamental concepts, and find ways to execute them.” This “political front” would insulate the jihadists from America’s machinations. This is exactly what Al Qaeda in Iraq did in 2006, when it formed the MSC, a coalition that was intended to pool the resources of various insurgents and shield the jihadists from the American divide-and-conquer strategy.
The same memo contains instructions for reforming the “management of the brothers” in Iraq, as they were often unruly. The author lamented that Zarqawi himself “is not able to make much improvement” in this regard, as he was being hunted. Al Qaeda’s chief concern was that poor management would lead to additional problems. “If he was able to find experienced brothers in administration, communication, and politics, he would have fixed a lot of these issues,” the al Qaeda author wrote of Zarqawi.
The Abbottabad files contain numerous mentions of Zarqawi, who was killed in June 2006. Later that year, the MSC was rebranded the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), the immediate predecessor to the current Islamic State. Al Qaeda apparently did not approve of the decision to announce a state inside Iraq, but bin Laden didn’t disown the ISI either. Bin Laden and his men continued to receive reports from Iraq well after Zarqawi’s demise. They also continued to support the ISI, both in public and behind the scenes.
In one just-released audio report, an al Qaeda correspondent explained that a new “media campaign” was necessary “to raise morale after the Sunni Awakening and the success of the Americans.” The recording was likely made sometime after the beginning of the so-called surge, which reversed the ISI’s gains throughout the country. While the situation was dire, the jihadist predicted that “Iraq will continue to be a fertile field for jihad,” which will “spread . . . to surrounding countries because of the chaos, conflicts, etc. . . . even if the ISI collapses.” He pointed to the Levant as a particularly promising new battlefield. Indeed, Syria is mentioned throughout the Abbottabad files as the next big theater for jihad—a forecast that has proven to be all too accurate.
Other files contain instructions relayed from al Qaeda’s central command to the ISI’s leaders. In a March 6, 2008, letter, for instance, Ayman al Zawahiri passed on an order from bin Laden to the ISI’s top men. Zawahiri told them to threaten Denmark over the publication, two years prior, of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. (The Abbottabad files show that al Qaeda repeatedly sought to capitalize on the controversy and strike Danish targets.) In his 2008 letter, Zawahiri also informed the ISI’s honchos that bin Laden wanted them to establish a “section within the Office of the Affairs of the Mujahedeen in the Islamic State of Iraq” that could collect “detailed questionnaires on each member indicating their age, health status,” and “experience” in various areas. The effort was supposed to help the ISI manage its personnel better.
The relationship between al Qaeda’s global management team and the ISI was fraught with difficulties. There is some debate within counterterrorism circles over whether the ISI was really a part of al Qaeda from 2006 onward. When the ISI was announced in 2006, the group’s leaders publicly claimed that Al Qaeda in Iraq had been dissolved. But an initial review of the Abbottabad files suggests that bin Laden still considered the ISI to be part of his network at the time of his death.
Regardless, bin Laden never would have approved of the Islamic State’s caliphate declaration in 2014. He and his chief lieutenant, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, set forth their thinking in a lengthy missive penned in the fall of 2010. A version of this letter was posted online by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center in 2012, but the CIA release this month includes other copies, some of which are addressed to al Qaeda commanders in Africa and the Middle East.
“Our main goal, and yours, is to resurrect the religion of Islam, and to build a Caliphate-based state in every Muslim country,” bin Laden and Rahman wrote to their commanders. “We need to concentrate our jihad efforts in areas where the conditions are ideal for us to fight,” they explained, naming Iraq and Afghanistan as “two good examples.” But al Qaeda’s leaders warned that they didn’t want “our jihad” to “become fruitless.”
“We need to fight in areas where we can gain points toward the creation of the Caliphate-based state,” they continued. Yet “the enemy” could “easily destroy” any state lacking the “essential foundations to function and defend itself.” Although al Qaeda viewed the United States as a weakened foe, the world’s only superpower was still strong enough to quickly topple Saddam’s regime and the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate. Bin Laden and Rahman warned that a newly declared caliphate would meet the same fate. “Building a state without proper foundations is like building a house in the middle of a torrential stream,” they analogized. “Every time the water destroys the house, we rebuild, then we rebuild until those who help us with the rebuilding give up on us.” For this reason, the “impact of losing a state can be devastating, especially if that state is in its infancy.”
Bin Laden and Rahman made a commonsense observation that resonates across many contexts: The “public does not like losers.” They advised al Qaeda’s regional managers to avoid skipping “any of the stages” necessary for building “public support.” These efforts were to be made in service of “long-term” state-building, as only a strong popular base could withstand America’s onslaught. “A quick work might be fruitful in the short run,” bin Laden and Rahman wrote, “but it is not what we need to do.”
Two years after bin Laden’s death, in mid-2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his subordinates defied these commands. Baghdadi reached out to other jihadists to see if they would support his caliphate claim. Baghdadi’s spokesman publicly declared the establishment of a new caliphate the following year. In some ways, Baghdadi’s loyalists showed that there was more of an appetite for an immediate caliphate proclamation than al Qaeda believed. Tens of thousands of jihadists and new recruits were electrified by the June 2014 announcement that a new caliphate had risen nearly a century after the last one was disbanded. Many of them remain inspired. Despite its territorial setbacks, it is too early to pronounce total victory over the Islamic State. As U.S. intelligence officials warned earlier this year, the organization likely retains enough personnel and resources to continue waging guerrilla warfare. And the Islamic State’s fortunes are no longer confined to Iraq and Syria. Its enterprise is global, with representatives everywhere from West Africa to Southeast Asia. Its network in the West will also continue to bedevil European and American counterterrorism officials.
Still, bin Laden warned that the jihadists would not be able to hold onto their territory if they declared a caliphate. He was right. Al Qaeda’s branches in Africa and the Middle East face their own hurdles, but they continue to follow his more patient approach. Time will tell if bin Laden’s longer-term plan for caliphate-building will bear fruit.
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
