Al Qaeda in Iraq: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The Threat

AQI's size and staying power matters; of all the Sunni insurgent groups, it is the only one that has declared an interest in targeting American interests outside Iraq. Even other Salafist-jihadist groups in Iraq such as Ansar Sunnah have made no indication that they want to fight outside Iraq. And the largest Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic Army of Iraq, has also insisted that its fight is in Iraq alone. When the Islamic Army of Iraq spokesman, Ibrahim al-Shammari, was asked in an interview on Al Jazeera in April, "Do your goals include causing America to fail abroad?" his answer was, "No, our goal is the liberation of Iraq from the occupation it is experiencing—the Iranian occupation and the American occupation." The Islamic Army in Iraq does not share AQI's radical brand of Salafist jihadism nor its penchant for global jihad; rather it is best described as "Islamist Nationalist," the group's communiqués making clear that its ambitions are restricted to creating a Sunni-dominated state run under Sharia law.

President Bush accurately reflected the available evidence when he stated in July that AQI was "a full member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network" that shares its parent organization's intent to attack the United States and its interests around the world. Although Zarqawi always maintained a certain independence from Al Qaeda's top leadership and was criticized by Al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the summer of 2005 for too harshly targeting Shiite civilians and other opponents, he made clear his commitment to a wider jihad against U.S. interests in the region by bombing three American hotels in Amman, Jordan, in November 2005, killing 60.

Zarqawi believed that establishing a stronghold in Iraq would provide "strategic depth and reach" for jihadists throughout the Middle East. "If we fail," the 2004 letter to Al Qaeda associates ascribed to Zarqawi noted, "we pack our bags and search for another land, as is the sad recurrent story in the arenas of Jihad." This closely echoes the views of Zawahiri, who wrote in his December 2001 tract Knights Under the Prophet's Banner that "victory by the armies cannot be achieved unless the infantry occupies territory. Likewise, victory for Islamic movements against the world alliance cannot be attained unless these movements possess an Islamic base in the heart of the Arab region."

Zarqawi's successor Masri—an Egyptian operative thought to have ties to Zawahiri—has stuck even more closely to the Al Qaeda hymn sheet. In May the Associated Press found that Masri spent significant time in and out of Al Qaeda camps in Taliban-run Afghanistan in the 1990s, and President Bush has depicted Masri's ties to the senior Al Qaeda leadership as "deep and longstanding." Masri's closeness to the top Al Qaeda leadership was reflected by an even more fulsome pledge of loyalty to bin Laden than his predecessor's and his clear commitment to bin Laden's global jihad; he declared, for example, in a November 2006 audiotape that his organization "would not rest from Jihad until we have blown up the White House."

Under Masri, AQI's ties with senior Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan appear to have deepened. In July, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi Al Qaeda operative, Khalid al-Mashadani, who told his interrogators that he had acted as a conduit between the top leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq and bin Laden and Zawahiri. According to the U.S. military, Mashadani revealed that "strategic direction" comes from the Al Qaeda senior leadership to the Al Qaeda in Iraq leadership. (Mashadani also said that Abu Omar Baghdadi, the titular Iraqi head of the "Islamic State of Iraq"—AQI's latest name for itself—was in fact a fiction and that an actor had been employed to record his frequent audiotapes. According to General Kevin Bergner, the senior director for Iraq, this was a ruse by Masri to mask the fact that much of AQI's leadership is foreign—the pretence even featured a lengthy declaration of loyalty last November by Masri to his fictional boss.)

A key question is to what extent AQI is currently willing to use Iraq as a launching pad for an attack on the United States. While AQI may be predisposed to attacking the United States, this does not mean that its leaders are willing to divert resources from the Iraqi front. Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University and a leading authority on terrorism, has argued, "[The threat jihadists] pose beyond Iraq is not so certain. There will be plenty of fighting to keep them there for years." However, the fact that much of AQI's leadership is foreign means that it is unlikely to be solely Iraq-centric in its approach. Indeed, Al Qaeda in Iraq may already have attempted an operation against the United States' closest ally: British authorities are currently investigating a possible link between AQI and the foiled terrorist attack in Glasgow in July. Additionally, AQI leaders may calculate that diverting resources from Iraq is worth the effort in that a successful attack against the United States or one of its allies would likely significantly boost the prestige of their organization among jihadists, both within and outside Iraq.

Some have argued that worsening sectarian conflict in Iraq in the event of a U.S. withdrawal would lead AQI to shift its focus toward attacking Iran rather than the U.S. homeland. In a July audiotape, AQI warned Iran that it might be targeted: "We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two-month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shiite government…Otherwise a severe war is waiting for you." But AQI is unlikely to drop its long-term goal of undertaking operations in the United States. And according to Mohammed Hafez, Al Qaeda's fight against Shiite ascendancy "may also generate opportunities for anti-Western recruitment through the claim that the United States and its Western allies have given primacy to the Shiites over true believers."

Today it is not clear that even if AQI made attacking the United States a priority it would have the capability to do so. Its ability to attack the U.S. homeland is dependent on developing safe havens in Iraq in which the long-term planning, recruitment, and training necessary for an attack can be managed. To have a chance of launching a successful plot against the United States, AQI needs to be able to operate camps in Iraq with something like the freedom that Al Qaeda had in Taliban-run Afghanistan, a freedom it does not currently enjoy. It should be noted that even with Al Qaeda's advantageous setup in Afghanistan it took Khalid Sheikh Mohammed three years to put together the 9/11 attacks. With the U.S. authorities now much more alert to the threat, launching a successful operation will likely require even more planning.

Al Qaeda today is more likely to be able to organize a significant terrorist attack against the United States from Pakistan than from Iraq. This July's National Intelligence Estimate stated that Al Qaeda had "regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas," while director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell testified in February that the next terrorist attack in the United States was most likely to emanate from Pakistan.

Al Qaeda currently has a strong presence in Baghdad and surrounding provinces such as Diyala to the northeast and Babil to the south, which includes a network of safe houses and patches of territory that they effectively control. However, Al Qaeda's safe havens in Iraq are currently significantly less secure than those in Pakistan's western mountains, and for two reasons. First, unlike Pakistan, the U.S. military is continuously launching operations against AQI, keeping the pressure up on the organization, making it much harder for it to organize large-scale foreign operations. And second, Iraq's relatively flat terrain makes it more difficult to conceal training camps.

The fact that Iraq is less safe an operating environment means that only the most committed and hardcore jihadists are willing to travel there, and when they do it is usually with a determination to fight in Iraq and not elsewhere. The difficult conditions in Iraq have also limited its ability to recruit European jihadists. Since 9/11, most of Al Qaeda's plots against Americans outside Iraq have involved militant European jihadists for whom receiving terrorist training from Al Qaeda, or its affiliates, in Pakistan is easier than it would be in war-torn Iraq. For example, the three Islamic militants, two of whom were German citizens, accused of plotting attacks on a U.S. airbase and consulate in Germany this September were allegedly trained in camps in Pakistan, as were British citizens of Pakistani descent accused of plotting attacks on U.S. airliners in August 2006. For British militant Islamists, Pakistan has been an obvious first choice for terrorist training.

AQI's current ability to launch out-of-area operations should nevertheless not be underestimated. After all, in November 2005 it was able to task a team of Iraqi operatives to launch simultaneous suicide bombing attacks on American hotels in Jordan, and in August of that year AQI operatives were responsible for rocketing two U.S. warships in the Port of Aqaba, killing a Jordanian soldier. Al Qaeda may also take advantage of refugee flows out of the country to infiltrate the West with operatives. The United Nations expects 40,000 Iraqi refugees to come to Europe alone in 2007, double the figure for 2006.

Any future withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq will obviously affect Al Qaeda's ability to operate in the country. President Bush, unsurprisingly, has a bleak assessment of what withdrawal would mean, saying in July that "surrendering the future of Iraq to Al Qaeda would be a disaster," which is an obvious exaggeration, as the thousands of fighters that make up Al Qaeda in Iraq have no hope of taking over the whole country. Conversely, in their calls to wind down the war, Democratic presidential candidates have tended to downplay potential gains that Al Qaeda might make in Iraq. Indeed, a false choice has been presented by politicians on both sides of the aisle: For many Republicans, the central front of the war on terror is in Iraq, while for many Democrats it's on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Unfortunately, the sad fact is that today there are two key havens for Al Qaeda and they are in both Iraq and in Pakistan's tribal areas.

A complete withdrawal of U.S. combat brigades from Iraq under current conditions is likely to significantly strengthen AQI. And it is by no means certain that foreign jihadists would be diverted from Iraq in such a scenario. AQI's foreign recruits have largely been from the hardline Salafist-jihadist school, which is extremely anti-Shiite. Such recruits would likely still have a high interest in fighting a Shiite regime that would be perceived to them as a U.S. puppet even after American troops depart. To the extent that history can predict the future, it should be noted that many more foreign jihadists traveled to Afghanistan around the time of the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989 than during the Russian occupation of the country. These fighters, whose ranks included the future AQI founder Zarqawi, traveled to Afghanistan because they wanted to participate in their day's celebrated jihadist cause, the civil war against a communist government seen as beholden to Moscow—a war they believed they had already nearly won by forcing the Soviet withdrawal. It is certainly possible that the perception that another world superpower has been defeated by jihadists may encourage even higher numbers of foreign militants to make the trip to join the Iraq jihad bandwagon.

U.S. withdrawal would also be a boon to AQI because of the intensification in the civil war that would probably result. Although AQI has lost its footing in the Anbar province of western Iraq, which is overwhelmingly Sunni in population, it is no accident that the two provinces in which it has been most active, Baghdad and Diyala, are also those in which sectarian conflict has raged most intensely. In a study of AQI attack claims in January, the terrorism research organization IntelCenter found that these two provinces accounted for over 70 percent of claimed operations. If, as can be expected following an American pullout, Shiite militias intensify their attacks on Sunnis in demographically mixed areas, Iraqi Sunnis will be more likely to turn to AQI to defend them. In such a scenario, Al Qaeda in Iraq's virulent anti-Shiite ideology will also likely resonate more strongly among Sunnis, especially the younger generation.

Such extra Sunni support may enable AQI to extend its safe havens in Iraq and reclaim ground lost in recent months. Given the fact that it has been hard for the United States military and Iraqi government to permanently dislodge AQI from parts of Iraq, Shiite-dominated government forces would not likely be able to deny AQI sanctuary in swaths of central Iraq.

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