BACKGROUND: Appointment in Samarra

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Written by Henry Adams

Published: 05 January 2016

In a 5,000-word piece published in Dec. 2014 in the London Guardian, Australian journalist Martin Chulov gave an account of ISIS's origins.  --  It is based on interviews with a jihadist using the name Abu Ahmed.  --  According to this jihadist, ISIS's origins are to be found in the U.S.-run prison in Iraq known as Camp Bucca, which was in use from 2003 to 2009.  --  Chulov says he has been in contact with this "senior leader" of ISIS since 2012.  --  Abu Ahmed's account of the group's origins in "a series of expansive conversations" is due to his "second thoughts" about ISIS, but he is afraid to leave the group lest he and his family be killed as a result.[1]  --  On this basis, Chulov reported...  --  THE STORY:  Ibrahim ibn Awwad al-Badri al-Samarrai, the man who would become ISIS's leader and self-proclaimed caliph of all of Islam, was born in 1971 in Samarra, and was already the leader of a militant group when, at the age of 33 and the holder of a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad, he was captured by U.S. forces in Fallujah in February 2004.  --  But the U.S. didn't know this.  --  Americans used his influence and apparent docility to help settle disputes in the camp, and then awarded him privileges which he used to network with other jihadists (writing contact information on the elastic bands of their boxer shorts for future reference).  --  He thus laid the basis of what has now become ISIS.  --  "If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no I.S. now," Abu Ahmed told Chulov.  --  "Bucca was a factory.  --  It made us all.  --  It built our ideology."  --  According to this version, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad helped ISIS develop because he was interested in destabilizing the American-backed regime in Baghdad.  --  To that end, in 2009 Assad's government facilitated a meeting of Syrian military intelligence officers with former Baathists who had taken refuge in Syria and senior al-Qaeda in Iraq (as what would become ISIS or the Islamic State was then called).  --  There, according to Iraq's then-intelligence chief, these former enemies made common cause for the first time on this occasion and organized spectacular attacks inside Iraq.  --  Abu Ahmed has become fatalistic:  "[ISIS] got bigger than any of us.  --  This can’t be stopped now.  --  This is out of the control of any man.  --  Not Baghdadi, or anyone else in his circle."  --  NOTE:  In September 2015, Chulov wrote that "I remain in regular contact [with Abu Ahmed, who] remains disaffected with the group, which he believes has strayed well beyond its original remit of fighting the U.S. Army and defending Sunnis against their marginalization in post-Saddam Iraq."  --  Martin Chulov's account is cited as authoritative in Gwynne Dyer's Don't Panic: ISIS, Terror, and Today's Middle East (Random House of Canada, 2015) and Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan's ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (Simon and Schuster, 2015).  --  Chulov has been called "one of the supreme journalists working in the field [of jihadism]" in John Stapleton's Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost (A Sense of Place Publishing, 2015).  --  Though a few have spoken admiringly of Chulov's "incredible interview" and "incredible scoop," I'm aware of no serious critic who has impugned Chulov's account in the year since it was published.  --  Still, one would think that this account would make it possible for the ISIS leadership without much difficulty to identify Abu Ahmed.  --  For those wondering how Chulov manages to be "in regular contact" with an ISIS leader, a thirty-minute Pacifica Radio conversation with him about reporting on Syria can be listened to on Soundcloud, in which he says he depends mostly on virtual private networks to communicate with sources....

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