Empire of Lies

13

Ayman Rasheed’s story began in the small town of Qayyarah, in the Niveneh Governorate of Iraq. The youngest of three boys, he grew up in a modest home on the west bank of the Tigris River, a home in which tradition, rather than religion, exerted the strongest pull.

Rasheed’s father was a conservative, stern, moderately devout man who prayed daily but only took one wife and didn’t spurn the occasional cigarette or glass of arak. He owned a small workshop where he made cinder blocks and sold decorative and paving stones to local builders. He put food on the table and a roof over his family’s head, and though he never missed a day’s work, he still managed the occasional idle evening of fishing or swimming in the river with his sons.

Outside school hours, the boys worked alongside their father from a young age. School was a mixed blessing for Rasheed. He loved reading and excelled in class, his brain compensating for his lack of brawn, but he also got ribbed a lot for it, by his classmates as well as by his more thuggish brothers. Working in his father’s small factory was less interesting to him, but it was physically demanding, even more so after the boys’ father came back from fighting in the Iraq-Iran war with a leg and three fingers missing along with a bitterness that manifested itself in vicious belt whippings.

As sanctions against Iraq bit and work dried out in the years following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Rasheed’s elder brothers were drafted into the dictator’s military machine. Rasheed soon followed in their steps. Once there, he quickly outperformed them, even though he lacked their brutal instincts and machismo. His intellect was spotted early, and his work ethic served him well. He was promoted to the rank of major in the Directorate of General Military Intelligence just weeks before the planes hit the Twin Towers.

In the months after 9/11, Rasheed could see the writing on the wall. He knew an invasion was coming, but he was still too junior and his influence inside the DGMI was stifled by Saddam’s cocky and arrogant inner circle. The warnings he managed to air were ignored. He lost both brothers to cruise missiles that first week. The onslaught that followed destroyed everything else about his life. The regime was scattered to the wind, the army disbanded, and Rasheed soon found himself back in Qayyarah, unemployed and demeaned in his own land.

Like many other young officers, rudderless and angry following the invasion, he was galvanized into militancy. The death and destruction all around him and the sight of American soldiers strutting around in their wraparound sunglasses and high-tech weaponry infuriated him. Worse still, and like many of his Sunni brethren, Rasheed was convinced that the invaders were trying to impose a power shift in his country, favoring the country’s Shia majority at the Sunnis’ expense.

The thinker turned into a soldier. Despite his father’s objections, Rasheed soon joined the burgeoning militancy around Mosul, not far from his hometown. He and his brigade of insurgents tasted some early success with IED attacks on American military convoys and hit-and-run assaults against private contractors and Kurdish units, but it wasn’t long before he was taken prisoner. After a vicious firefight with a marine unit near Kirkuk in the summer of 2004, he was shackled and chained and then quickly escorted to Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.

It was in Bucca’s sprawling compounds, safe from the bloody mayhem outside its walls, that ISIS would first take root.

Day in, day out, with his brothers dead and his country destroyed, everything Rasheed saw and heard around him fueled his rage. Mistreatment, humiliation, and abuse were rampant. Husbands, fathers, and sons were rounded up in neighborhood raids and locked up, even though many of them were not even combatants. Others imprisoned there, however, were not as benign, and it was toward them that Rasheed gravitated, especially after receiving news that his parents had died in a Shi‘ite militia attack on his hometown.

Rasheed changed. He was trapped in a painful spiral of grief, anger, and hopelessness. At first, he plodded through the long, solitary hours by pumping iron, channeling his rage to sharpen his physical prowess. More crucially, he also began conversing with people he’d always vilified: the radical Islamists.

Most of those who would become the leaders of ISIS spent time in U.S. prisons during the American occupation of Iraq, whether at Bucca, Camp Cropper, or, more infamously, Abu Ghraib—time that had a radicalizing and incendiary effect on them. But it was Bucca that became the main incubator for the movement. It was there that Saddam Baathists like Rasheed, who were for the most part only mildly devout, and fundamentalist Islamists, two groups who were previously enemies, found themselves thrown together for the first time. Incarceration gave them the opportunity to talk, air their grievances, and discover a common cause: they were both Sunni, and they both hated the Americans and the Shi‘ites, their ancient sectarian foes. In those prisons, they plotted what they would do once freed, and freed they were—either by their captors, as in Rasheed’s case during autumn 2007, or in armed prison breaks after the Americans had handed the prisons over to their new Shi‘ite allies.

For Rasheed, going home was no longer an option. It had been superseded by a burning desire for retribution and war.

Not just any war. A holy war. Jihad.

There would be no shortage of foot soldiers to wage it, not after the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army and left its four hundred thousand men stripped of their jobs and their pensions—but not their guns.

In Baghdad, Rasheed sought the men he’d met at Bucca and rejoined the fight—a fight that began in Iraq and soon spread to Syria. Thousands of local fighters were joined by hordes of foreign jihadists, fanatics who dreamed of establishing an Islamic caliphate where the rules of the seventh century still applied or of finding martyrdom while trying. And while the gruesome public face of the growing uprising featured a garish collection of religious extremists, its hidden leadership was almost entirely composed of highly trained former Iraqi officers like Rasheed who had served under Saddam and for whom the Islamists were no more than useful idiots—convenient, if expendable, allies.

Rasheed’s expertise in military intelligence, his strategic guile, and his tactical ruthlessness rapidly pushed him up the ladder of ISIS’s command structure. With each passing week, more bodies piled up and more land fell under its control. Huge swathes of Iraq and Syria—an area the size of Britain—were in its disheveled fighters’ hands, and over twelve million people lived under their tyranny. But it didn’t last long, and Rasheed was clever enough to see what was coming.

It wasn’t going to end well. Not for the struggle against the Syrian regime and their Shi‘ite rivals, and not for him. Attacking Europe and cheerleading other attacks as far away as Boston and San Bernardino had created a tidal wave of enmity against ISIS. Russia and America were now fully engaged, and while they had conflicting agendas, their objective was the same: to wipe ISIS out, even at the cost of keeping the Syrian regime, its butchers, and its chemical weapons, in power.

Aerial raids on Raqqa and other ISIS strongholds killed hundreds of its fighters and destroyed many of its oil refineries and tanker convoys. American warplanes destroyed one of its vaults in Mosul, turning hundreds of millions of dollar bills into ash. The world’s richest terrorist group was on the ropes. Fighters were abandoning the sinking ship in droves, shaving off their beards and melding into the chaos.

Their caliphate wasn’t going to happen.

Long before the tide of battle had turned, Rasheed had been out of step with the obscurantist dystopia the jihadists were trying to forge. Closing down schools, making all shops close at prayer times, outlawing cigarettes and music. Forcing women to cover up from head to toe in black, whippings for even showing an eyebrow. Sadistic public stonings and executions, including crucifixions. This was as bad as life under the Taliban, if not worse. No one in their right mind would want to live that way.

Rasheed certainly didn’t.

He considered himself a good Muslim, but this wasn’t the world he aspired to create. With each passing week, he watched with increased irritation as the movement’s cretinous leaders made new blunders and announced even more asinine edicts. He’d hitched his wagon to them out of anger and desperation, but the whole caliphate train had derailed and it was about to go hurtling over a cliff.

It was time to bail.

Capturing the museum director and getting his hands on the man’s phenomenal discovery couldn’t have happened at a more opportune time. And Rasheed knew enough about history to know how radically different the great caliphates were from the crass version these barbarians were aiming for.

A thousand years before ISIS, Arab intellectual achievement and culture led the world while Christendom languished in the gloom of the Dark Ages. Back then, Muslim societies were open and curious, while Christian Europe was insular and fearful of blasphemy. Education was valued and scientific knowledge was prized. Aristotle’s writings were translated and studied in Baghdad and Cordoba, but they were banned in Rome and Paris.

Rasheed knew all about those heady days, when his ancestors were propelled by a self-confident openness to new ideas and a desire to appropriate, learn, and expand. A worldview that was based on a unique mix of theology and rational thinking had produced groundbreaking advances in medicine, astronomy, cartography, and mathematics. Art, poetry, and music flourished. Muslim thinkers were also at the vanguard of developing sophisticated arguments in philosophy, theology, law, and literature. Ancient Greek, Indian, and Persian texts were translated into Arabic, studied by Muslim scholars working alongside Christian and Jewish colleagues, and used to inspire further discoveries by the likes of Thomas Aquinas. For seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. Baghdad, home to Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom founded by the caliph Harun al-Rashid in the late eighth century, was the epicenter of the intellectual world.

Rasheed also knew all about the glorious era when Islamic empires stretched from Spain to China. The Moors had ruled as far as the Iberian Peninsula and the South of France; the Ottomans overran the Balkans and Hungary and were at the gates of Vienna. These were truly the days of empire and caliphate. The Christian world had trembled before the armies of Islam, armies Rasheed would have been proud to serve in, armies led by men who were driven by a thirst for conquest and glory but who were also animated by an expansive spirit, a hunger for knowledge, art, wisdom, and conversation. But those exalted days were long gone. It had been centuries, Rasheed felt, since his people had achieved anything they could be proud of.

Avicenna, Averroës, Rhazes.

Abd al-Rahman III, Saladin, Suleiman the Magnificent.

Names that, to that day, many centuries later, still inspired awe, admiration, and respect.

When was the last time anyone from Rasheed’s part of the world had been held in such high esteem—not just by his own people, but by the whole world?

Rasheed knew that his jihadist comrades and their aspirations were a far, far cry from all that. But thanks to the museum director’s secret, he now had an alternative.

There definitely was a caliphate to strive for.

It just wasn’t the one ISIS had in mind.