The real insurgency

'We don't need al-Qaida'

Abu Theeb is the leader of a band of Sunni insurgents that preys on US
targets north of Baghdad. Last week he openly defied al-Qaida in Iraq
by actively supporting the referendum. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad spent five
days with him - and uncovered evidence of a growing split in the
insurgency

Thursday October 27, 2005
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1601208,00.html

Abu Theeb is a tall, handsome, well-built man with a thin beard and
thick eyebrows. His name is a nom de guerre: it means Father of the
Wolf. He is a farmer during daylight and a commander of a mujahideen
cell, a group of holy warriors, at night. He and his men roam the
farmland north of Baghdad in search of prey - a US armoured Humvee,
perhaps, or an Iraqi army unit. On the eve of last week's
constitutional referendum, Abu Theeb, the leader of a group of Sunni
insurgents, was to be found in the middle of a schoolyard in a village
north of Baghdad. The school was to be a polling centre the next day.
He stood flanked by 10 bearded fighters in white robes and chequered
headscarves.

There were a few posters on the walls, and plastic ribbons marking out
lanes where voters would queue, but other than Abu Theeb and his men,
the building was deserted. The security guards hired by the referendum
committee in Baghdad had failed to show up - not all that surprising an
event in one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq. The local tribe, ie
Abu Theeb and co, are notorious for kidnappings and executions.

Abu Theeb looked around him, a commander inspecting the field before
battle. He moved with his men around the school, inspecting the
adjacent streets and the back gate, looking for weak points, looking
for easy access for a car bomb or an armed onslaught. The school guard
sheepishly followed the entourage around, a Kalashnikov on one
shoulder.

At one point, Abu Theeb grabbed a piece of paper and drew a sketch of
the school, marking out where his men should be posted the next day. He
turned to a short, chubby ginger-haired guy in his 30s with a big
jihadi beard. "You will be the commander tomorrow," he said.
"Distribute some of our weapons to the men."

The stakes were high for Abu Theeb and his men. Al-Qaida forces in Iraq
- forces that are, at least on paper, allies of the Sunni insurgents -
had vowed to kill anyone who took part in the referendum. But in the
Sunni areas of Iraq, the people and the local Iraqi insurgents among
them had a different view: they were eager to vote. There was a
widespread sense of regret about the boycotting of the last elections,
which left the parliament in Baghdad dominated by Shia and Kurdish
parties - and left the Sunnis, who held the power in Saddam's Iraq, out
in the cold. The Sunnis wanted to take part in last week's referendum;
they wanted a "no" vote on the draft constitution.

This left Abu Theeb, a man who has devoted himself and his resources to
fighting the Americans, in a curious position. His battle on polling
day would be to secure a safe and smooth voting for his people - in a
referendum organised by the enemy. In doing so he would be going up
against the al-Qaida forces, and risking a split in the insurgency in
Iraq.

I spent five days with Abu Theeb and his people last week, and I
witnessed a very curious thing: a bunch of mujahideens talking politics
and urging restraint. "Politics for us is like filthy dead meat," Abu
Theeb told me. "We are not allowed to eat it, but if you are passing
through the desert and your life depends on it, God says it's OK." This
is a profound shift in thinking for these insurgents, a shift that
might just change the way things develop in Iraq.

While we were at the school, Abu Theeb pulled one of his young men
aside and rebuked him for an IED - improvised explosive device -
bombing the night before: "I thought we agreed that nothing will happen
for the next few days." The short young man mumbled that it wasn't his
group - someone else must have done it.

Abu Theeb's village, where the polling station was based, is a small
hamlet that lies on the banks of the Tigris river north of Baghdad. A
serpent-like road passes through the village. The palm groves on either
side of the road are pockmarked by bomb craters.

A couple of thousand Sunni Arabs from one tribe live here. Everyone is
related; they say they can trace their history back to the prophet
Muhammad. Women are rarely seen in public and almost everyone is a
fundamentalist Salafi Muslim. The men sport big bushy beards and wear
ankle-length dishdashas [robes]. Mosques are scattered everywhere and
at prayer time the place grinds to a halt.

There are two ways into the village. The official way in takes you
through a 100m-long checkpoint of blast walls, concrete barriers and
barbed wire. It is manned by masked Shia Iraqi soldiers from the south
of the country and commanded by US soldiers. Cars and cards are checked
regularly and the roads are closed down, forcing people to drive for
hours through the farmlands around the village before hitting the main
road again. Driving in and out through this checkpoint reminds one of a
second world war movie of an eastern European town under German
occupation. The locals call the checkpoint the Rafah crossing, in
reference to the notorious checkpoint in Gaza.

Then there is the unofficial way in. A narrow, bumpy farm road provides
the mujahideens with safe access into the village away from the weary
eyes of the Iraqi soldiers. This is the road Abu Theeb took in last
week. I went with him on condition that I did nothing to reveal his
identity or the location of the village. For the purposes of the
assignment, I was advised to pray, fast and dress like the men of the
village, although I am not religious.

Abu Theeb was born in this village four decades ago. He was one of five
brothers and several sisters and his father was an illiterate farmer
who went everywhere with his short-wave radio and loved to talk
politics. In the 80s, Abu Theeb's eldest brother was killed fighting in
the Iran-Iraq war.

Abu Theeb studied law at university in Baghdad before joining the
Institute of National Security, an elite academy reserved mostly for
Sunni Arabs. It was the graduates of this academy who were used to
staff Saddam's secret services; Abu Theeb was a loyal citizen, and he
went on to a job in the security services. But his nationalism
evaporated after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. "I hated the government,"
he says. "I realised that all that they were telling us about the
nation and the leader was false. They had no pride, no honour. I wanted
to leave, to take a long break, so I left the service to do religious
studies."

He joined an Islamic Sharia school to train as a cleric. There he fell
in love with two subjects: the teachings of Ibn Taimia, the father of
the fundamentalist Salafi school of thinking, and religious politics.
Later, however, he was obliged to return to his old job at the Amn
al-Aam, the General Security, one of Saddam's feared security
apparatuses, and there he stayed until the American occupation toppled
the regime.

"When the fall happened, I went to a cleric I knew who was preaching
jihad and asked him for weapons," he says. "I was weeping. He said, 'Go
away, things are too dangerous.' I roamed the streets with a dagger in
my pocket. I was too ashamed to come back home and see my family while
Baghdad was under the occupation, dead bodies and bullet shells
everywhere."

He finally met up with a group of Syrian volunteers in Baghdad. They,
like him, were looking for a fight with the Americans. He brought them
back to his home, he says, and formed one of the first jihadi cells.
They got to work.

"When the infidel conquers your home, it's like seeing your women raped
in front of your eyes and like your religion being insulted every day,"
says Abu Theeb.

He joined others and started first with direct rocket-propelled grenade
hits and small arms attacks on US convoys around his area, until a
fellow Salafi fighter taught him how to set an IED using primitive
techniques, a TV remote control and some artillery shells.

A visiting Iraqi army general laid the ground rules for the group: IEDs
were the most successful weapon, but should always be laid at least two
kilometres outside the village to spare the people the wrath of the
Americans.

"Everyone was fighting, men who under Saddam spent years as military
deserters became zealous fighters," says Abu Theeb. "Something like
fire was inside us. We would go out to fight for days, leaving our
families and wives behind."

He and other Salafi fighters became known as the Anger Brigade, an
insurgent group that has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks on
US and Iraqi targets and is involved in kidnapping those who are
perceived as collaborating with the much-hated occupation.

This is truly a holy war for Abu Theeb. He tells me how once he was
driving to Baghdad carrying a sack filled with anti-tank rocket heads
for an operation in Baghdad. He was stopped at a checkpoint and
American soldiers ordered him to step out and begun a car search. "I
prayed to God," he says. "I told him, 'God, if I am doing what I am
doing for your sake then spare me this. If it's not, let them get me.'
The American soldier opened the boot where I had the sack filled with
rocket heads. He moved it aside and started to search. When he finished
and asked me to leave, I knew then I was blessed by God."

God has not been so merciful with the rest of his family. One of his
brothers and a nephew have died fighting the Americans; another brother
was killed a month ago as he was setting an IED on the side of the
road. But Abu Theeb's faith remains strong.

For more than two years, Abu Theeb had been taking part in insurgent
attacks on US and Iraqi targets, laying IEDs, carrying out ambushes and
kidnappings. Then, about eight months ago, a group of Syrian men
visited him. They identified themselves as part of the al-Qaida group
in Iraq, and they asked for his cooperation in establishing a foothold
for their organisation in his area. "They told me that they had support
and money and wanted to open a new front here," says Abu Theeb. "I said
to them, 'What about the village - do you want this to become a new
Fallujah?'" Abu Theeb didn't want al-Qaida, even if their aims were
ostensibly the same. "When al-Qaida came here I was the first to fight
it," he says. "They went to the clerics and said, 'Denounce this man.
If not, your blood will be spilled.' They can kill and slaughter
easily."

Abu Theeb and other Salafi clerics and leaders of the insurgency north
and south of Baghdad are now talking about a rift - a split between
Iraqi Islamist and nationalistic insurgent groups, and the mainly
foreign led and supported al-Qaida forces. They say that al-Qaida
initially gained support among the Sunnis because of its ferocity and
meticulous planning, and because it had money pouring in from jihadis
all over the Arab world. Made up mostly of foreign Arabs, it quickly
became the most feared insurgent group in Iraq, claiming responsibility
for the bloodiest attacks against not only US and Iraqi forces but also
civilians.

"If it wasn't al-Qaida fighting with the Sunnis in Iraq the whole
battle would have had a different outcome," says Abu Hafsa, another
mujahideen commander based north of Baghdad. Abu Qutada, a mujahideen
leader based in south Baghdad, agrees. "Lots of the mujahideen groups
are in need of money and weapons so they join the umbrella of al-Qaida
for support," he says. But he adds: "They differ with them in
ideology."

The arrival of al-Qaida

The tipping point came when al-Qaida, known then as the Tawhid
al-Jihad, decided to target the Iraqi police and army and other Iraqi
ministries and institutions. Its goal was to prevent the Americans
establishing an Iraqi state that could lead the fight against the
insurgency - and allow the Americans to take a back seat. "They have
experience in fighting and they did very clever stuff," says Abu Theeb.
"They attacked all the centres of the Iraqi state and prevented the
Americans from creating a puppet state that they could hand everything
to. The Iraqi resistance was occupied by fighting the Americans and
couldn't see that strategic goal."

Perhaps inevitably, though, the insurgents turned out not to have the
same stomach for Iraqi blood. "Al-Qaida believes that anyone who
doesn't follow the Qur'an literally is a Kaffir - apostate - and should
be killed," says Abu Theeb. "This is wrong."

Al-Qaida marked down not only those who cooperated with the American
occupation, but everyone who worked with the Iraqi government, police
or army, as Kaffirs. Then they said that the entire Shia community were
Kaffirs. For Sunnis like Abu Theeb, this was a step too far.

The second serious stumbling block has been al-Qaida's call for the
establishment of an Islamic state (caliphate) based on the Taliban
model in Afghanistan. This has already started taking place in towns
and villages where al-Qaida is dominant. "The resistance now is made up
of nationalist and religious elements," says Abu Theeb. "By calling for
a caliphate you will alienate not only the resistance but the support
we get from Syria and the gulf countries." The last thing these
countries want is a Taliban state as a neighbour.

Al-Qaida's policies have drawn a furious response from the Iraqi
security forces and the Shia militias, and it is Sunnis who have
suffered. Scores have been executed after being kidnapped by
paramilitary units. In Abu Theeb's area alone, more than 300 Sunni
families have taken refuge after fleeing Shia areas in Baghdad. "Every
time al-Qaida attacks a Shia mosque we are making all the Shias our
enemies," he says. "We are cementing them against us." Later he says:
"We have lost more men to the Shias than we have lost to the
Americans."

This rift in the insurgency has already gone far beyond angry words.
Clashes erupted between al-Qaida fighters and Iraqi mujahideen cells
after al-Qaida killed a group of Iraqi insurgents who they claimed were
spying for the Americans.

Back in the village, politics has become a hot issue. Everywhere - in
the mosques after prayers, at weddings, in the main market and in
private mujahideen circles - the talk is of politics. Abu Theeb says
his move into politics has come at a price: he has had to shave off his
beard so that he can visit Baghdad. For weeks he has been travelling,
visiting houses, urging people to register to vote. "It's a new jihad,"
he says. "There is time for fighting and a time for politics."

I went back to the school with Abu Theeb on polling day. There was a
festival atmosphere. Two of his guards were already at their positions,
but the rest were more relaxed - their weapons lay against the wall and
on tables.

"No one will attack," said Abu Theeb. Inside the classroom that had
become the polling station, an old sheik sat on a wooden bench. "The
judge and the monitors didn't come from Baghdad - they said this is a
hot area - so the sheik of the village is going be the monitor," said
Abu Theeb. People began to trickle in. The officials present soon
decided that it was not realistic to expect the women to come in, so
each man who came in with an ID card was given a whole stack of ballot
papers. "Nine papers to Haji Abu Hussein," shouted a registration
official. Another official sitting on another table handed Haji Abu
Hussein the nine ballots. The man took his ballots, but instead of
voting in private in the ballot box, he publicly ticked the "no" boxes,
folded the papers, and then chucked them in the box.

By midday people had stopped coming and the officials started ticking
the boxes on ballot papers themselves. The next day, America and the
authorities were crowing about how well the referendum had gone;
yesterday - after a "yes" vote had been returned - leading Sunni
politicians accused the Shia in the south of stuffing ballot boxes.
Well, some of the Sunnis in the north are certainly guilty of it.

Two days after the balloting, Abu Theeb and two other clerics sat on
the floor of a mosque debating the political future of their group and
the Sunnis in general. "We should keep all the options open," Abu Theeb
told them. Even a coalition with the enemy.

.