THERE was a palpable sense of déjà-vu about last week’s late-night US military raid on a residential building in the northwestern Syrian town of Atmeh. Helicopters, special troops, gunfire and explosions, a terrorised neighbourhood. And, of course, a presidential team watching events unfold in real time from the Situation Room in the White House.
In this case, however, there was also a slight sense of ‘déjà-who?’ Unlike Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was hardly a household name. Despite his elevation to the post of Islamic State’s (IS) ‘caliph’ after Baghdadi’s death in 2019, Qurayshi maintained a low profile even within the organisation.
And Joe Biden, in his inevitable post-mortem presidential speech crowing about how “thanks to the bravery of our soldiers, this horrible terrorist leader is no more”, referred to the target as ‘Haji Abdullah’ — which matches neither his nom de guerre nor his Iraqi birth name, Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abd-al-Rahman al-Mawla.
It is far from clear whether the elimination of the figurehead will make a difference, beyond the psychological blow. Qurayshi was apparently a driving force in the atrocities against the Yazidis. It goes almost without saying that a record of ruthlessness is bound to have been a requirement for the post he held.
Fighting terror with terror can carry on forever.
Beyond that, his biography is rather murky. He evidently served in Saddam Hussein’s army, pursued religious studies at the University of Mosul, volunteered his services to Al Qaeda in Iraq, and was incarcerated in Camp Bucca — the American prison in Iraq that served as an incubator for IS. Surprisingly, given his subsequent career trajectory, he became prominent as an informant at Bucca. He named names and provided other details. “Detainee is providing a lot of information,” an interrogation report noted, and an analyst described him as “a songbird of unique talent and ability”.
His reputation as an eager collaborator with the occupying authorities was apparently common knowledge among his confederates. It’s intriguing that he nonetheless became a key lieutenant to Baghdadi. There may be more here than meets the eye, but it could be a long time before we find out.
After all, it has come to light only in recent months, courtesy investigative reporting published in The New York Times, that a shadowy component of the Pentagon “sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians” during the years of combat that initially decimated IS.
A small unit known as Talon Anvil, operating between 2014 and 2019, was tasked with picking targets for US airstrikes. NYT cites “people who worked with the strike cell” in reporting that “it circumvented rules imposed to protect noncombatants, and alarmed its partners in the military and CIA by killing people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings”.
Another NYT report about how Task Force 9, under whose aegis Talon Anvil operated, initiated a ‘defence’ bombing raid on the Tabqa Dam, which was supposedly off-limits. The dam was under IS control, but the US-led coalition knew a breach threatened hundreds of thousands of lives. Disaster was averted only with an emergency ceasefire and a collaborative engineering effort by avowed enemies. Such collaboration for the common good remains an exception, of course — else it might jeopardise the ‘war or terror’.
The recent revelations about the conduct of warfare in Syria, which vary vastly from the official narrative, are based largely on whistleblower testimony. Unlike, on a different front, last week’s Pentagon report about the Kabul airport attack last August that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 US military personnel. The death toll has been blamed entirely on a solitary IS suicide bomber.
That isn’t inconceivable, of course, given the densely packed crowds. But reports that at least some of the casualties were claimed after the blast by US troops firing into the crowd have been dismissed, without any Afghan witnesses being interviewed. Who can say whether somewhat different details will emerge a few years hence?
Rest assured, though, that every US president will have his ‘gotcha’ moment. Biden last week claimed that the raid in Syria, conducted this way in order to “minimise civilian casualties”, had “successfully removed a major threat to the world”.
That may be so. The viciousness of IS, in all its permutations and across its various branches, is beyond doubt. And it’s hardly the only group of its kind with an international reach. But who can seriously doubt that when it comes to violence on an industrial scale, ‘non-state actors’ can only dream of matching the lethal firepower — and all too often even the viciousness — of state actors?
Fifty-five years on, Martin Luther King’s 1967 description of his country as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” sadly remains all too true.
Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2022