The Al-Douri Factor

Dan Darling, The Weekly Standard: How one of Saddam's closest Baath party aides came to be an ally of militant Islamists.

AT FIRST GLANCE, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri does not appear to be the most likely candidate to serve as an ally of militant Islamists. The former vice chairman of the Iraqi Baath Party's Revolutionary Command Council, al-Douri was the only member of Saddam's inner circle not in Baghdad when the city fell, having had the luck or foresight to set up his headquarters in the northern city of Mosul. One of the earliest members of the Iraqi Baath party and one of the three survivors of the 1968 coup that brought the Baathists to power inside Iraq, al-Douri has emerged since the fall of Saddam Hussein as a key leader within the insurgency. As Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz explained in June 2004, the insurgency "was led by Saddam Hussein up until his capture in December. It's been led, in part, by his No. 2 or 3, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, since then." READ MORE

No one disputes al-Douri's brutality or his reputation for ruthlessness. Following the first Gulf War, al Douri was one of the chief architects of the campaign to suppress the uprising that followed the conflict in the south. In addition, he helped to supervise the al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds during the Iraq-Iran War, including the use of chemical weapons against Kurdish settlements in 1987. Yet evidence has surfaced since the fall of the insurgency that in addition to assuming command of at least some of the remnants of the Iraqi military, security, and intelligence forces as well as the surviving Baath

party cadres, al-Douri has also been able to maintain ties with the Islamist elements of the insurgency.

The first postwar evidence of this emerged in October 2003, when NBC reported that two captured members of Ansar al-Islam revealed that al-Douri was helping to coordinate their attacks inside Iraq. According to the U.S. State Department, Ansar al-Islam "is closely allied with al-Qa'ida and Abu Mu'sab al-Zarqawi's group" and "has become one of the leading groups engaged in anti-Coalition attacks."

To many observers, this seemed to be an odd alliance, since in addition to being a Baathist, al-Douri was also associated with the Qadri and Rifai schools of Iraqi Sufism, which were viewed with contempt by Ansar al-Islam prior to the war. Yet these same observers forget that from 1993 onwards al-Douri headed up the Iraqi regime's al-Hamlah al-Imaniyyah (Return to Faith) campaign which loosened earlier restrictions on religion and substantially reduced earlier Islamist opposition to Saddam's rule. Also, as a regular speaker at Iraq's Popular Islamic conferences geared at ingratiating Saddam to radical Islamist groups, al-Douri could successfully present himself to Ansar al-Islam as an individual with solid Islamist credentials, whatever his Sufi leanings.

Reports of ties between al-Douri and Islamist groups intensified following the December 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein, culminating in a May 2004 report by the Yemeni Hadramoot Arabic Network that was translated as follows by the SITE Institute, a non-profit organization that monitors information relating to terrorist networks:

. . . The Mujahideen had made preparations to greet them until it was possible to bring them together with Zarqawi, and the "Heroes' meeting" took place . . . In an atmosphere full of enthusiasm and high spirits for everybody, with the company of his three sons and a number of Mujahideen, Izzat Ibrahim Al Douri took off to meet with Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi. At their arrival, the Mujahideen greeted them amidst calls of "Allah Akbar" (3 times) [God is Greater]. Then the sound of gunfire was heard as Zarqawi rushed out, surrounded by the Mujahideen, covered by the dust of their blessed journey," according to the network. It added that, at the sight of Zarqawi, Izzat Ibrahim shouted: "You are the commander and we are your soldiers." His son Ahmad handed him a copy of the Quran. His father took it, placed his hand and the hands of his sons on it, and they made an oath to God, pledging allegiance to Zarqawi in the Jihad until victory or martyrdom, in good and bad times."

In the end, the network stated that, "the meeting was brief. Izzat's sons were placed with the Mujahideen, and the father was placed in the ranks of Zarqawi and other Mujahideen leaders. That day witnessed distribution of hundreds of automatic weapons and large quantities of ammunition on the Mujahideen."

The general account of the meeting appears to have been confirmed following month, when senior officials told Fox News that al-Douri was "an avowed and 'fanatic' Islamist whose two sons have sworn 'fealty' to Usama bin Laden." According to these senior officials, al-Douri "is in league with Zarqawi and Al Qaeda elements." Whatever the nature of his past Sufism, al-Douri had pledged himself and his followers to the most extreme Salafist elements of the Iraqi insurgency.

Such current ties to al Qaeda and its allies raise the inevitable question of whether or not any existed prior to the war. According to a March 2002 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, another Iraqi imprisoned intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammed, who had been captured by Kurdish forces en route to the Ansar al-Islam enclave, had claimed that Abu Wael was "the actual decision-maker" for the group and "an employee of the Mukhabarat," the Arabic name for Iraqi intelligence.

While traveling through northern Iraq in 2002, Jonathan Schanzer, a specialist in radical Islamic movements at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, met a former member of Iraqi intelligence named Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who had been imprisoned by the Kurds since March 2002. Al Shamari revealed a wealth of purported information about pre-war ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, including details about the activities of Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif, a member of Ansar al-Islam's ruling council far better known as Abu Wael.

Al-Shamari went even further than Muhammed, claiming that Abu Wael had married one

of al-Douri's cousins and had even met with Saddam Hussein "four or five times." Claims of Iraqi assistance to Ansar al-Islam are even supported by the 9/11 Commission which--despite having been widely reported as having "debunked" claims of such a link--also noted cryptically: "There are indications that by then [2001] the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al-Islam against the common Kurdish enemy."

One possible instance of this "help" was noted very early on in the existence of Ansar al-Islam's predecessor Jund al-Islam. Dr. Barhim Salih, the then-prime minister for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Sulaymania, noted in the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's PolicyWatch in October 2001 that a group of Iraqi Sunni Arabs were working with Jund al-Islam from Mosul, a city well within Saddam Hussein's sphere of control. Interestingly enough, a CIA assessment leaked to the New York Times in March 2003 noted the existence of an al Qaeda cell in Mosul which had been able to organize freely during the same time that al-Douri had shifted his base of operations to the northern city. While smaller than the main al Qaeda contingents in Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan, the Times reported that the Mosul cell and its counterparts might be planning to attack U.S. forces trying to stabilize Iraq after the war, a line of analysis which seems to have panned out.

An official who had read the analysis told the Times that the CIA assessment "doesn't make a big deal of Al Qaeda and Saddam" but noted that "There's a confluence of interests, to be sure. And that's dead Americans." In retrospect, this seems to have been a convergence that Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri understood all too well.

Dan Darling is a counter-terrorism consultant for the Manhattan Institute's Center for Tactical Counter-Terrorism.

For those who don't believe al Qaeda and its affilates can't work with those other Islamists outside their brand of Sunni Wahabism (like those of the Iranian regime) , take note of this report.