The Rise of Islamic State Read Online Free

The local emir or leader of ISIS demanded $500,000 a month in protection money from his company. “I complained again and again to the government in Baghdad,” the businessman said, “but they would do nothing about it except to say that I should add the money I paid to al-Qaeda to the contract price.”
    ISIS had another advantage, which has so far given it an edge over its many enemies. The Euphrates and Tigris river valleys, and the bleak steppe and desert where it operates in northern and western Iraq and eastern Syria, look very much the same whatever side of the border you are on. But the political and military conditions are wholly different in the two countries, enablingISIS commanders to move their forces back and forth between them, to take advantage of opportunities and to catch their enemies by surprise. Thus, ISIS took Mosul and Tikrit in June but did not attack Baghdad; in July it inflicted a series of defeats on the Syrian army; in August it stormed into Iraqi Kurdistan; and in September it was assaulting the Syrian Kurdish enclave at Kobani on the border with Turkey. ISIS was much strengthened by operating in two different countries.
    The fall of Mosul in June 2014 is such a turning point in the history of Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East that it is worth describing in some detail how and why it fell.
    In the lead-up to the siege, ISIS’s campaign had begun with what appear as diversionary attacks on other targets in northern Iraq. This was probably a tactic to keep the Iraqi army and government in two minds for as long as possible about the real target. First, a column of vehicles packed with gunmen, and carrying heavy machine guns, smashed its way into Samarra in Salah ad-Din province on June 5 and seized much of the city. This was bound to elicit a strong government response because Samarra, though mostly Sunni, is the site of al-Askari, one of the holiest Shia shrines. A bomb attack in 2006 had led to a furious Shia response, with Sunni being massacred allover Baghdad. Predictably, the Iraqi army helicoptered in reinforcements from its elite Golden Division to drive out the enemy fighters. Other diversions included one in which gunmen seized part of the university campus at Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, where hundreds of students were briefly held prisoner. In another at Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, a car bomb hit the counterterrorism bureau. Here, as elsewhere, the assault team did not press home their attacks and soon withdrew.
    The attack on Mosul was much more serious, though this was not at first apparent. It began with five suicide bombings backed up by mortar fire. ISIS was joined by other Sunni paramilitary groups, including the Baathist Naqshbandi, Ansar al-Islam, and the Moujahideen Army, though how far these groups operated outside the authority of ISIS has been a matter of dispute. Jihadi fighters overran and tore down government checkpoints that had long paralyzed traffic in the city but proved useless as a security measure. These attacks were no different from those diversionary sorties launched further south, but on June 7 the US and the Kurdish Interior Ministry both detected a large ISIS convoy traveling from Syria towards Mosul. The next day’s fighting was critical, as squads of ISIS fighters seized important buildings including the Federal Police headquarters. InBaghdad the government wholly failed to comprehend the seriousness of the situation, telling worried US diplomats that it would take a week to send reinforcements to Mosul. It also turned down an offer by Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, to send his peshmerga into Mosul to fight ISIS, considering it as an opportunistic land grab.
    Defeat became irreversible on July 9, when three top Iraqi generals—Abboud Qanbar, the deputy chief of staff, Ali Ghaidan, the ground forces commander, and Mahdi Gharawi, the head of Nineveh Operations—climbed into a helicopter and fled to Kurdistan. This led to a final collapse