Demotix/Nils Henrik. All rights reserved.Saddam Hussein created
the Fedayeen Saddam in 1994 as a paramilitary Praetorian unit.
The Fedayeen were initially charged with protecting the regime from a repeat of
the revolts that followed Saddam’s eviction from Kuwait by acting as a
pre-emptive counter-insurgency force.
Over time this internal security mission
became increasingly about enforcing Islamic law. Saddam had begun Islamizing his regime in the late 1980s,
and intensified this in the early 1990s, attempting to create a synthesis of
Ba’athism and Salafism to buttress his legitimacy. Saddam had begun Islamizing his foreign policy as early as
1982-83, making alliances with all manner of Islamist terrorists, thousands of
whom came to Iraq for training in the 1990s, where they attended camps run by
the Fedayeen. In the Fedayeen—connected to the global Islamist terrorist
movement, combining elements of Ba’athism with an increasingly-stern
Salafism—is a microcosm of the Saddam regime’s mutation into the Islamic State
(ISIS).
By the time the
Fedayeen were created in October 1994, Saddam had already begun his
mosque-building campaign and subsidizing religious teachers and imams, making
them their communities’ leaders, both policies laying the groundwork for the
religiously-inspired post-Saddam insurgency. Gambling and public consumption of
alcohol had already been banned, and zakat (the Islamic poor
tax) and the Shari’a punishment for theft (amputation) had already been
imposed. In August 1994, the regime made prostitution a capital crime.
A good example of the
Fedayeen acting as a mutaween (religious police)—and
not-incidentally foreshadowing ISIS—was the beheading of women accused of
prostitution, with swords, in front of their own homes, before an assembled
crowd, with their “heads…left on the front doorsteps…as
a deterrent.” Human rights groups say at least 200 women were beheaded in this
way in the Saddam regime’s final two years.
The Fedayeen produced
gruesome propaganda videos showing barbarous acts—from eating live wolves to
lurid forms of murder for “spies”—intended to further recruitment and to
intimidate enemies. Military exploits by masked Fedayeen were also videoed and
distributed. A focus was put on inculcating the “spirit” of the
Fedayeen—believed by many senior Saddamists to be the “spirit” the regime
needed to recover—in children, with camps set up where children were given guns
and military training (again, on disseminated video). While corruption overtook
the Saddam regime in the 1990s—even, in the compliment of vice to virtue,
corruption within the regime’s organized, sanctions-busting criminality—the
reaction to corruption (financial and moral) in the Fedayeen was ferocious:
“Punishments … included having one’s hands
amputated for theft, being tossed off a tower for sodomy, being whipped a
hundred times for sexual harassment, having one’s tongue cut out for lying, and
being stoned for various other infractions. … [m]ilitary failure also became
punishable as a criminal offense.”
There is more than an echo of ISIS in
this.
Demotix/Nils Henrik. All rights reserved.When Saddam fell in April 2003, there
were up to 95,000 “former regime elements” (FREs)—soldiers,
militiamen, and intelligence officers and agents—still under arms, including 30,000 Fedayeen Saddam. When
Saddam’s Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, wrote to Saddam during the invasion that
regime suicide bombers in civilian clothes should target the Americans to sow
distrust and pre-emptively destabilize the occupation, it was almost certainly
Fedayeen that Sabri had in mind for the job. The Fedayeen, often fighting in civilian garb, were almost
the only force that did any fighting as the Coalition drove up to Baghdad.
The reason the Fedayeen were the main
force resisting the invasion was because to the very last Saddam believed he
would survive and the real threat was that a limited Coalition attack would
spark a rebellion—again, internal dissent was seen as the primary challenge,
not external attack. And let it be said, while the Fedayeen crumpled in the
face of Anglo-American armed units, the Fedayeen succeeded against terrorized
civilians. There was no Iraqi revolt during the invasion. As a man in Najaf explained, “How can I make an intifada? If I
go outside the Fedayeen will kill me.”
To the extent Saddam
saw an external foe during the invasion it was Iran, which he thought might
capitalize on a Shi’ite revolt. Consequently, the networks of Fedayeen and
other militias in their safe-houses throughout the Shi’a south, where they had
been positioned since the mid-1990s to head-off a rebellion, were
strengthened—accidentally laying the groundwork for a decentralized
insurgency—and the main force of the regular army was placed along the border
with Iran.
As part of maintaining
internal security, the Fedayeen had used terrorism, including on at least one occasion a suicide bombing against
the Kurds. But the Fedayeen’s terrorism was not confined within Iraq’s borders.
Internal Iraqi documents show that an operation called “Blessed July” was planned for the summer of
1999 with fifty Fedayeen militiamen sent to bomb Iraqi opposition targets in
the Kurdistan area, Iran, and London. What was targeted and if any of them were
hit is unknown. The Fedayeen—referred to as “martyrs” throughout the
documents—were reminded to use “death capsules” if captured in Europe.
Even when the Fedayeen
technically were within Iraq’s borders, their contribution to
terrorism was global. Four thousand foreign Salafi-jihadists were defending Saddam during the invasion—just in Baghdad—and they were organized by the
Fedayeen Saddam, and fought on well after the Republican Guards and other
conventional units had called it quits. Not all of the foreign holy warriors in
Iraq had arrived in the months before March 2003 when it was obvious an
invasion was coming.
Training camps in Iraq, most notoriously Salman Pak but Lake Tharthar, Samarra, Ramadi, and at least one near Baghdad that was so
sophisticated it rivalled the training facilities of the American Marines,
graduated at least 8,000 terrorists between 1998
and 2002. Whether al-Qaeda or the Taliban sent men to be trained at
these camps is simply unknown, though al-Qaeda did have training camps on Iraqi
soil before the Saddam regime fell, in Kurdistan.
The Qaeda affiliate,
Ansar al-Islam, which ran these camps from early 2000 was essentially a joint enterprise of the Saddam regime and
al-Qaeda. Led by loyalists of Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, who had been granted seed
money by Osama bin Laden in late 1999 for his terrorist organization in Taliban
Afghanistan, Ansar had senior commanders who were Iraqi intelligence officers
and was pretty openly supplied with money and weapons by Saddam. Zarqawi took
direct leadership of Ansar in late 2002—he had been in Baghdad in May 2002 and
then moved through the Levant setting up the networks that brought the foreign
fighters into the New Iraq—and there is no doubt about the
Fedayeen-Qaeda/Zarqawi connection in the aftermath of the regime. Ansar was deeply tied to the Fedayeen.
There was some
distance between the Fedayeen and the networks of Saddam’s deputy, Douri, while
the regime lasted and this continued afterward. But Douri and Mohammed Younis
al-Ahmed, the masterminds of the Iraqi insurgency who
had fled to Syria, were hardly scrupulous in their distribution of resources to
those who could frustrate the Americans. The Douri/Younis network concentrated
patronage on a core of professionals from the old regime, with the skills and
local knowledge around which an insurgency could be (and was) built.
Many of
the FRE-dominated Ba’athist-Salafist insurgent units that Douri most heavily
supported had important Fedayeen contingents and Douri had no qualms in helping
the foreign-led Salafi-jihadists, a number of whom were brought into Iraq by
Douri through connections he made during the Faith
Campaign, with assassinations and sabotage. The Douri-linked FREs brought
Ansar back into Iraq from Iran—where Ansar had fled during the invasion and
been sheltered by the mullahs—and Douri put his stolen car business at the
disposal of Zarqawi’s car bombers. In short, both the Fedayeen and Douri were
supporting Ansar.
The Fedayeen also provide a microcosm of the way the Assad regime has weaponized Salafi-jihadism and helped ISIS grow.
Two Ba’athist-Salafist
insurgent groups with notable Fedayeen contingents were Jaysh al-Muhammad,
probably the strongest insurgent unit in the immediate aftermath of the regime
and one most directly controlled by Douri and Younis, and Jaysh al-Mujahideen
(JAM). Interestingly, ISIS’s “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a member of
JAM by 2006, though it is possible he was really a
member of ISIS’s predecessor and had infiltrated JAM. There is also a report
from Amatzia Baram, who has done much work on the
Saddam regime’s Islamization and the way this mutated into ISIS, that
al-Baghdadi actually “served” with the Fedayeen, though when and in what
capacity is not specified.
The Fedayeen also
provide a microcosm of the way the Assad regime has weaponized Salafi-jihadism
and helped ISIS grow since before the US invasion of Iraq. After failing to
repel the American invasion, “many ‘[Fedayeen] Saddam’ members fled to Syria,
where they constituted the nucleus for the establishment of ISIS,” writes
Baram.
In March 2007, the US apprehended a former Fedayeen leader
“involved in setting up training camps in Syria for Iraqi and foreign fighters”
in Mosul. Also notable, when ISIS decided in late 2011 to exploit the networks
Assad had allowed them operate on Syrian soil to inject themselves into the
uprising, one of the men in the advanced party that ISIS sent into Syria to set
up Jabhat an-Nusra was Maysar Ali Musa al-Jabouri (a.k.a. Abu Mariyah
al-Qahtani). Al-Qahtani is a former Fedayeen and had been active for ISIS’s predecessor
in Mosul, where the Assad-supervised ratlines provided particularly strong
support to the Iraqi insurgency. The exploitation of the Syria-based ISIS
networks would go both ways: Assad (and Iran) would encourage ISIS’s growth to discredit and
destroy the Syrian uprising.
The early, foreign-led
leadership of ISIS has been picked off over the years, especially following the
2007 Surge and notably with the mass-cull of April-June 2010. With the
flow of foreign fighters drying up in the 2007 to 2011 period, the replacements were Iraqis, and they were the
most competent at counterintelligence and operational security: the FREs.
While none of the
named top commanders of ISIS have yet been demonstrated to have Fedayeen
background, the Fedayeen likely form an important part of ISIS’s “mid to
upper-tier commanders,” Mello says. The Fedayeen’s role in logistics and
facilitation within ISIS goes back to the early days of the insurgency.
“Several insurgent cell leaders in Fallujah in 2004 were former Fedayeen
accepted into Salafist groups on the condition they repudiated Saddam,” Mello
continues. And the Fedayeen linked up with ISIS’s predecessors for terrorist
attacks on the Coalition by drawing on “connections going back to their
pre-invasion relationship with Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal-Jihad. Notably the leader
of Zarqawi’s ‘Umar Brigade’ cell formed in 2005 tasked with attacks against
Badr and other Shi’ite groups was a former Fedayeen.”
The Fedayeen did not
have access to the intellectual capital and logistics capacity, such as the
personal connections, that the senior military and intelligence officers did,
so it makes sense that they would not rise to the apex of ISIS, but they would
be the prime candidates when ISIS was repairing its mid- and upper-mid-level
structure.
The Fedayeen helped
imbue ISIS with the spirit of fanaticism and cruelty from the beginning, and by
now, with all of the former Iraqi insurgent groups—and their Fedayeen
contingents—subordinated to ISIS, their role must be relatively enhanced. The
Fedayeen were a key part of Saddam’s Islamization program, internally and
externally, linking the regime with Islamist terrorists around the world, and
in the aftermath provided connections with al-Qaeda and its offshoots for the
Salafized regime remnants. The Fedayeen was a crucial glue that helped bind the
disparate elements of the Iraqi insurgency together as it transformed into
ISIS.
Excerpted from A
Case Study of the Islamic State as the Saddam Regime’s Afterlife: The Fedayeen
Saddam, first published on Baghdad Invest
on 30 August 2015.