ISIL/ISIS Or What Is In A Name?
Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)
All,
Get a bit frustrated with the inane debate over ISIS versus ISIL.
The Intel community started by using ISIL and the Press used ISIS. The Administration uses Daesh.
Given that its followers hold territory in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq and they claim to have footholds in northeastern Afghanistan, parts of Algeria and northeastern Nigeria then all three terms are clearly obsolete.
The correct term is Islamic State.
Understanding that requires a longer explanation. So, as Paul Harvey used to say, "Here is the rest of the story."
A Complex History of Names
The root of the Islamic State begins with founding of al Qaeda (The Base) in Pakistan in 1988 and then its arrival in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.
In 1999 in Afghanistan, an al Qaeda (AQ) operative, Abu Musad al-Zarqawi (AMZ), a Jordanian, was given funds by Usama bin-Laden (UBL) to set up the Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of the Levant or JAS) branch of AQ (and Sham is the last "S" in ISIS).
AMZ's job was to form up and prepare the JAS to go to the Levant/Sham and spread the global jihad. His unit was part of 055 Brigade of the Taliban Army in Afghanistan.
After the 9/11 Attacks in 2001, AMZ was wounded in a US strike in Afghanistan in late 2001 or early 2002. He fled towards the Iranian border, was given sanctuary by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and eventually safe passage to join Ansar al-Islam (Islamic Partisans) in Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 2002.
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, AMZ was invited by the Ba'athist holdouts in Syria led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri (protected by "our good friend" Bashar Assad) to join in their war against the Coalition forces in Iraq and kill and maim Americans.
AMZ then created Jama'at al Tawhid wa-al-Jihad (The One God Religion and Jihad Organization) and moved into Iraq's Sunni Triangle, spending most of his time in al Anbar fighting the Marines.
He obtained a fresh supply of foreign fighters courtesy of a jihadi pipeline set up in Syria by Bashar Assad (when with the Marines in Iraq in 2004, we called them the Syrian ratlines).
Later in October 2004, just before the second Marine offensive on Fallujah, AMZ renamed the organization Tanzim Qa'idat al Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (The Mesopotamia Base Organization) and reaffirmed his allegiance to UBL and AQ.
The current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote to AMZ about the war in Iraq in July 2005, declaring that Iraq was "the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era."
Things did not go well for AQ. On 7 June 2006, AMZ was killed by US Special Operations forces.
Later that year, what was left of his organization finally settled on the name al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq (The Islamic State in Iraq or ISI) and that was where the "ISI" (used in ISIS and ISIL) first originated. The US intelligence community called this organization al Qaeda in Iraq or AQI.
On 13 October 2006, AQI/ISI declared a caliphate in Fallujah and that was the first time that word was formally adopted by the Islamic extremists.
With AMZ dead, AQI/ISI went into a long decline culminating in the Sunni Awakening where the Sunni Tribes in al Anbar rose up and smashed AQI/ISI during 2007- 2008. By 2011, violence in Iraq had dropped by over 90%.
Iraq had become the world’s 6th fastest growing economy. Its national debt had been 100% of GPD in 2003 but only 31% by 2011 and with a balanced Federal budget. Life in Iraq was better than it was in 2003 (or even in 1978 – before Saddam) for every segment of the society, by region, by ethnicity, by religion and by every meaningful economic metric. Unemployment had fallen from +50% in 2003 to 11%. More kids were in school then ever before and Iraq was undergoing the biggest building boom in its history, all of which was accompanied by a rapidly growing standard of living.
It looked like the war Iraq was over and by late 2011 the US had completely withdrawn.
But we had forgotten about “our good friend” Bashar Assad.
In March 2012, "our good friend" Bashar faced a massive non-violent movement aiming to transition Syria from a corrupt and bloody dictatorship to a Western-leaning progressive democracy.
"Our good friend" Assad responded by beating, arresting, torturing and summarily executing the non-violent protesters. Unlike the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran where the protesters were easily suppressed, in Syria, they fought back.
The Ayatollahs in Iran and Putin in Russia went all in in their support for Assad and soon both, along with Iran's surrogate, Hezbollah in Lebanon, were making their presence felt on the Syrian battlefield. The pro-democracy fighters were pummeled unmercifully and beaten by Assad and his allies.
The leaders in Paris, Berlin, London, Washington and elsewhere did nothing of merit as Syria spiraled into terrible civil war.
This vacuum created the opportunity for the Islamic extremists in Iraq. In January 2012, the bulk (but not all) of ISI/AQI began leaving Iraq for Syria and created Jabhat al-Nusra Front (Front to Support the Levant People) or JN which we called Al Qaeda in the Levant or AQL.
In April 2013, AQI operative Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi split off from AQL to form what came to be called al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi I'-Iraq wash-Sham which we call either ISIS or ISIL. By the way, the acronym for al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi I'-Iraq wash-Sham is Da'ISh where the Administration gets Daesh.
Ironically, the jihadi pipeline Bashar Assad had created to kill Americans in 2003 became in 2013, the primary Islamic State pipeline for foreign fighters bent on killing him and his followers. As the saying goes, "He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind."
In early 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi reentered Iraq at the head of the Islamic State army and captured large swaths of northwestern Iraq.
All the promise of 2011 was destroyed because of one man's egomaniacal thirst for personal power. May Bashar Assad rot in hell.
That is the long but tragically fascinating and important history of the Islamic State's name.
Semper Fi,
Mike
