Opaque structure adds to challenge of defeating Isis

August 24, 2014 4:02 pm
Opaque structure adds to challenge of defeating Isis
By Sam Jones in London Isis©Reuters

International pressure may be mounting for the west to scale up its military efforts against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, but the global intelligence community is still piecing together a picture of the organisation, its capabilities and its intentions.

Western spymasters have come under increasing pressure for having underestimated Isis, which in the space of a year has exploded in size and influence beyond the confines of the Syrian civil war in which it first thrived.

Even the size of the group is unclear. Iraqi agencies and regional counterparts say the group has as many as 50,000 fighters. US intelligence estimates have put the figure at about 10,000. Britain is even more conservative. One British intelligence official said UK agencies estimate Isis’s size to be somewhere “in the low thousands”.

But understanding the group’s operational structure and, crucially, identifying its leaders is arguably more significant in defeating Isis than counting its fighters. The group’s workings are opaque – even the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a mystery until his Ramadan sermon appeared online last month.
“They have learnt [since the 2006 Iraq insurgency],” says Anthony Cordesman, former director of intelligence at the Pentagon, now at the CSIS, a Washington think-tank. “They have far more dispersed authority. They make sure they have two commanders on the scene at all times; they have a lack of a centralised control. Leaders set policy but they don’t attempt to plan every operation one by one. And they are mobile. Most people in the group have no idea where the key leadership is.”

When the UN Security Council last week passed a resolution aimed at condemning Isis and curbing the group’s money-raising capabilities, it sanctioned six individuals, but only two were actual members of Isis – Hamid Hamad

Hamid al-Ali, a financier, and Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, Isis’s propaganda chief.

Other sources, including signatures on declarations and documents in the areas Isis governs, open-source social media imagery and texts and intelligence officials, provide a more comprehensive, if still limited, picture of the group’s hierarchy.

As with its predecessor organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Isis’s senior leadership is divided between a shura council – a ruling ‘cabinet’ consisting of ministers with responsibility for specific areas such as recruitment, finances and food supplies – and a smaller military council, with its own military chief. Below the military council are officials with special responsibilities and areas of expertise, such as building truck bombs or improvised explosive devices.

Mr Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed “caliph” of Isis exerts his authority over the organisation, as his AQI predecessors did, through two key means: an internal security hit-squad to assassinate wayward subordinates and a religious authority to bring ideological pressure to bear.

Besides this core structure, Isis has a “government” of regional emirs, responsible for their own regions, and separate military commanders. Putting names to all these roles is complicated, and made more so by the ubiquitous use of noms de guerres.

Isis’s war ‘minister’ is reputed to go by the name of Abu Suleiman al-Naser, and like Mr Baghdadi was imprisoned at Camp Bucca, the US internment centre in Iraq, before becoming a jihadi. Hazem Abdul Razzaq al-Zawi is the interior ‘minister’ and Abu Safwan Rifai is security chief, according to detailed but unverifiable information leaked through an anonymous – and therefore only partly credible – internet account known as ‘wikibaghdadi’ in 2013.

Other figures can be more clearly identified. Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Bilawi was one of Isis’s top commanders – some sources say he was the group’s overall military chief. His death in June directly preceded Isis’s assault and capture of Mosul. Isis insiders sometimes refer to the attack as the Bilawi campaign.

Abu Omar al-Shishani – a Chechen – has also become a figure in the group. He commanded his own faction, Jaish al-Muhajireen, in Syria before defecting to Isis. Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi, known as “the desert lion”, is another senior commander – and is more keen to show his face than others in Isis. He is recognisable in dozens of images: a stern, unsmiling, thuggish face framed with shoulder-length black hair.
Abdullah al-Janabi – once a key AQI figure who evaded US assassination attempts – also appears to have a senior role in Isis, though his title is unclear. Mr Janabi has regularly held sermons in the Iraqi city of Fallujah since it was seized by Isis at the end of 2013.

“The leadership of Isis is essentially Iraqi Ba’athist and very concerned about regaining power in Iraq,” says Richard Barrett, former head of global counter terror operations at MI6 and now a jihadism expert at the Soufan Group.

“You can see it in their military experience. The old AQI people have formed the nucleus of the group and are committed to the same ideas.”

For AQI, the ideological target had always been “the near enemy” – a term that essentially refers to other muslims, particularly Shia and monarchies such as the Hashemites or the house of Saud. By comparison, the core al-Qaeda

network has always focused on the “far enemy” – Western infidels.
With the US’s campaign of air strikes, and Isis’s murder of James Foley, however, the group may have shifted its focus. Unlike AQI, Isis has declared itself a transnational “caliphate” and may need to stake a more international claim to authority.

“Isis is in competition to replace al-Qaeda as the main jihadi brand,” says one senior Israeli intelligence official. “The difference with al-Qaeda is not in their ideology. The difference is how and when. Isis want it now. Al-Qaeda is more patient.”

The issue is further complicated by questions of command and control.
According to some of the western intelligence assessments, it is unclear how much central authority Isis is exerting on regional groups committing atrocities. A large influx of new members, drawn by the ultraradical ideological promises of the caliphate, is not fully integrated into Isis’s command structure – partly because the group’s leadership is paranoid about infiltration and partly because the group’s activities are now spread so widely. The new zealots are likely to be more freewheeling and unpredictable in their actions, intelligence officials believe.

How quickly or not Isis could strike out against the west – either according to a centrally formulated plan or by its eager recruits – remains to be seen.

“When it comes to planning an attack abroad,” says the Soufan Group’s Mr Barrett, “Right now, they do not have the capabilities.”

For Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics who has studied al-Qaeda, the first target will probably be regional.

“I would be terribly concerned about [American or European] diplomatic facilities in Lebanon, in Jordan and in Turkey – they are a soft underbelly. They are going to do their best to hit hard.”