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| One of the Islamic State’s senior commanders reveals exclusive
details of the terror group’s origins inside an Iraqi prison – right
under the noses of their American jailers. |
In the summer of 2004, a young jihadist in shackles and
chains was walked by his captors slowly into the Camp Bucca prison in
southern Iraq. He was nervous as two American soldiers led him through
three brightly-lit buildings and then a maze of wire corridors, into an
open yard, where men with middle-distance stares, wearing
brightly-coloured prison uniforms, stood back warily, watching him.
“I knew some of them straight away,” he told me last month.
“I had feared Bucca all the way down on the plane. But when I got there, it was much better than I thought. In every way.”
The
jihadist, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed, entered Camp Bucca as a
young man a decade ago, and is now a senior official within Islamic
State (Isis) – having risen through its ranks with many of the men who
served time alongside him in prison. Like him, the other detainees had
been snatched by US soldiers from Iraq’s towns and cities and flown to a
place that had already become infamous: a foreboding desert fortress
that would shape the legacy of the US presence in Iraq.
The other
prisoners did not take long to warm to him, Abu Ahmed recalled. They had
also been terrified of Bucca, but quickly realised that far from their
worst fears, the US-run prison provided an extraordinary opportunity.
“We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere
else,” he told me.
“It would have been impossibly dangerous.
Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away
from the entire Al Qaeda leadership.”
It was at Camp Bucca that
Abu Ahmed first met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of Isis who is now
frequently described as the world’s most dangerous terrorist leader.
From the beginning, Abu Ahmed said, others in the camp seemed to defer
to him. “Even then, he was Abu Bakr. But none of us knew he would ever
end up as leader.”
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| Detainees in Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq. — Photo by AFP |
Abu Ahmed was an essential member of the earliest incarnation of the
group. He had been galvanised into militancy as a young man by an
American occupation that he and many like him believed was trying to
impose a power shift in Iraq, favouring the country’s larger Shia
population at the expense of the dominant Sunnis. His early role in what
would become Isis led naturally to the senior position he now occupies
within a revitalised insurgency that has spilled across the border into
Syria. Most of his colleagues regard the crumbling order in the region
as a fulfilment of their ambitions in Iraq – which had remained
unfinished business, until the war in Syria gave them a new arena.
He
agreed to speak publicly after more than two years of discussions, over
the course of which he revealed his own past as one of Iraq’s most
formidable and connected militants – and shared his deepening worry
about Isis and its vision for the region.
With Iraq and Syria
ablaze, and the Middle East apparently condemned to another generation
of upheaval and bloodshed at the hands of his fellow ideologues, Abu
Ahmed is having second thoughts. The brutality of Isis is increasingly
at odds with his own views, which have mellowed with age as he has come
to believe that the teachings of the Qur’an can be interpreted and not
read literally.
His misgivings about what the Islamic State has
become led him to speak to the Guardian in a series of expansive
conversations, which offer unique insight into its enigmatic leader and
the nascent days of the terror group – stretching from 2004, when he met
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Camp Bucca, to 2011, when the Iraqi insurgency
crossed the border into Syria.
At the beginning, back in
Bucca, the prisoner who would become the most wanted man in the world
had already set himself apart from the other inmates, who saw him as
aloof and opaque.
But, Abu Ahmed recalled, the jailers had a very different
impression of Baghdadi – they saw him as a conciliatory and calming
influence in an environment short on certainty, and turned to him to
help resolve conflicts among the inmates.
“That was part of his act,” Abu Ahmed told me.
“I
got a feeling from him that he was hiding something inside, a darkness
that he did not want to show other people. He was the opposite of other
princes who were far easier to deal with. He was remote, far from us
all.”
* * *
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| Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. — Photo by AFP |
Baghdadi was born Ibrahim ibn Awwad al-Badri al-Samarrai in
1971, in the Iraqi city of Samarra. He was detained by US forces in
Falluja, west of Baghdad, in February 2004, months after he had helped
found a militant group, Jeish Ahl al-Sunnah al-Jamaah, which had taken
root in the restive Sunni communities around his home city.
“He was caught at his friend’s house,” said Dr Hisham al-Hashimi, an analyst who advises the Iraqi government on Isis.
“His friend’s name was Nasif Jasim Nasif. Then he was moved to Bucca. The Americans never knew who they had.”
Most
of Baghdadi’s fellow prisoners, some 24,000 men, divided into 24 camps,
seem to have been equally unaware. The prison was run along strictly
hierarchical lines, down to a Teletubbies-like uniform colour scheme
which allowed jailers and captives alike to recognise each detainee’s
place in the pecking order.
“The colour of the clothes we wore reflected our status,” said Abu Ahmed.
“If
I remember things correctly, red was for people who had done things
wrong while in prison, white was a prison chief, green was for a long
sentence and yellow and orange were normal.”
When Baghdadi, aged
33, arrived at Bucca, the Sunni-led anti-US insurgency was gathering
steam across central and western Iraq. An invasion that had been sold as
a war of liberation had become a grinding occupation. Iraq’s Sunnis,
disenfranchised by the overthrow of their patron, Saddam Hussein, were
taking the fight to US forces – and starting to turn their guns towards
the beneficiaries of Hussein’s overthrow, the country’s majority Shia
population.
The small militant group that Baghdadi headed was one
of dozens that sprouted from a broad Sunni revolt – many of which would
soon come together under the flag of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and then the
Islamic State of Iraq. These were the precursors to the juggernaut now
known simply as the Islamic State, which has, under Bagdhadi’s command,
overrun much of the west and centre of the country and eastern Syria,
and drawn the US military back to a deeply destabilised region less than
three years after it left vowing never to return.
But at the time
of his stay at Bucca, Baghdadi’s group was little-known, and he was a
far less significant figure than the insurgency’s notional leader, the
merciless Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who came to represent the sum of all
fears for many in Iraq, Europe and the US.
Baghdadi, however, had
a unique way to distinguish himself from the other aspiring leaders
inside Bucca and outside on Iraq’s savage streets: a pedigree that
allowed him to claim direct lineage to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). He
had also obtained a PhD in Islamic studies from the Islamic University
of Baghdad, and would draw on both to legitimise his unprecedented claim
to anoint himself caliph of the Islamic world in July 2014, which
realised a sense of destiny evident in the prison yard a decade earlier.
“Baghdadi was a quiet person,” said Abu Ahmed.
“He
has a charisma. You could feel that he was someone important. But there
were others who were more important. I honestly did not think he would
get this far.”
Baghdadi also seemed to have a way with his captors.
According to Abu Ahmed, and two other men who were jailed at Bucca in
2004, the Americans saw him as a fixer who could solve fractious
disputes between competing factions and keep the camp quiet.
“But as time went on, every time there was a problem in the camp, he was at the centre of it,” Abu Ahmed recalled.
“He
wanted to be the head of the prison – and when I look back now, he was
using a policy of conquer and divide to get what he wanted, which was
status. And it worked.”
By December 2004, Baghdadi was deemed by his jailers to pose no further risk and his release was authorised.
“He was respected very much by the US army,” Abu Ahmed said.
“If
he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t.
And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising
under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was
no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a
factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”
As Isis has
rampaged through the region, it has been led by men who spent time in US
detention centres during the American occupation of Iraq – in addition
to Bucca, the US also ran Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, and, for
an ill-fated 18 months early in the war, Abu Ghraib prison on the
capital’s western
outskirts.
Many of those released from these
prisons – and indeed, several senior American officers who ran detention
operations – have admitted that the prisons had an incendiary effect on
the insurgency.
“I went to plenty of meetings where guys would
come through and tell us how well it was all going,” said Ali Khedery, a
special aide to all US ambassadors who served in Iraq from 2003-11, and
to three US military commanders. But eventually even top American
officers came to believe they had “actually become radicalising
elements. They were counterproductive in many ways. They were being used
to plan and organise, to appoint leaders and launch operations.”
We wrote each other’s details on the elastic of our boxer shorts. When we got out, we called each other.
Abu Ahmed agreed. “In prison, all of the princes were
meeting regularly. We became very close to those we were jailed with. We
knew their capabilities. We knew what they could and couldn’t do, how
to use them for whatever reason. The most important people in Bucca were
those who had been close to Zarqawi. He was recognised in 2004 as being
the leader of the jihad.
“We had so much time to sit and plan,” he continued.
“It was the perfect environment. We all agreed to get together when
we got out. The way to reconnect was easy. We wrote each other’s details
on the elastic of our boxer shorts. When we got out, we called.
Everyone who was important to me was written on white elastic. I had
their phone numbers, their villages. By 2009, many of us were back doing
what we did before we were caught. But this time we were doing it
better.”
According to Hisham al-Hashimi, the Baghdad-based
analyst, the Iraqi government estimates that 17 of the 25 most important
Islamic State leaders running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in
US prisons between 2004 and 2011. Some were transferred from American
custody to Iraqi prisons, where a series of jailbreaks in the last
several years allowed many senior leaders to escape and rejoin the
insurgent ranks.
Abu Ghraib was the scene of the biggest – and
most damaging – breakout in 2013, with up to 500 inmates, many of them
senior jihadists handed over by the departing US military, fleeing in
July of that year after the prison was stormed by Islamic State forces,
who launched a simultaneous, and equally successful, raid on nearby Taji
prison.
Iraq’s government closed Abu Ghraib in April 2014 and it
now stands empty, 15 miles from Baghdad’s western outskirts, near the
frontline between Isis and Iraq’s security forces, who seem perennially
under-prepared as they stare into the heat haze shimmering over the
highway that leads towards the badlands of Falluja and Ramadi.
Parts
of both cities have become a no-go zone for Iraq’s beleaguered troops,
who have been battered and humiliated by Isis, a group of marauders
unparalleled in Mesopotamia since the time of the Mongols. When I
visited the abandoned prison late this summer, a group of disinterested
Iraqi forces sat at a checkpoint on the main road to Baghdad, eating
watermelon as the distant rumble of shellfire sounded in the distance.
The imposing walls of Abu Ghraib were behind them, and their jihadist
enemies were staked out further down the road.
The
revelation of abuses at Abu Ghraib had a radicalising effect on many
Iraqis, who saw the purported civility of American occupation as little
improvement on the tyranny of Saddam.
While Bucca had few abuse complaints prior to its closure in
2009, it was seen by Iraqis as a potent symbol of an unjust policy,
which swept up husbands, fathers, and sons – some of them non-combatants
– in regular neighbourhood raids, and sent them away to prison for
months or years.
At the time, the US military countered that its
detention operations were valid, and that similar practices had been
deployed by other forces against insurgencies – such as the British in
Northern Ireland, the Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Syrian
and Egyptian regimes.
Even now, five years after the US closed
down Bucca, the Pentagon defends the camp as an example of lawful policy
for a turbulent time.
“During operations in Iraq from 2003 to
2011, US Forces held thousands of Law of War detainees,” said Lt Col
Myles B Caggins III, a US Department of Defense spokesman for detainee
policy.
“These type of detentions are common practice during
armed conflict. Detaining potentially dangerous people is the legal and
humane method of providing security and stability for civilian
populations.”
* * *
Some time after Baghdadi was released from Bucca, Abu Ahmed
was also freed. After being flown to Baghdad airport, he was picked up
by men he had met in Bucca. They took him to a home in the west of the
capital, where he immediately rejoined the jihad, which had transformed
from a fight against an occupying army into a vicious and unrestrained
war against Iraqi Shia.
Death squads were by then roaming Baghdad
and much of central Iraq, killing members of opposite sects with routine
savagery and exiling residents from neighbourhoods they dominated. The
capital had quickly become a very different place to the city Abu Ahmed
had left a year earlier.
But with the help of new arrivals at
Bucca, those inside the prison had been able to monitor every new
development in the unfolding sectarian war. Abu Ahmed knew the
environment he was returning to. And his camp commanders had plans for
him.
The first thing he did when he was safe in west Baghdad was to
undress, then carefully take a pair of scissors to his underwear. “I cut
the fabric from my boxers and all the numbers were there. We
reconnected. And we got to work.” Across Iraq, other ex-inmates were
doing the same.
“It really was that simple,” Abu Ahmed said,
smiling for the first time in our conversation as he recalled how his
captors had been outwitted.
“Boxers helped us win the war.”
Zarqawi wanted a 9/11 moment to escalate the conflict –
something that would take the fight to the heart of the enemy, Abu Ahmed
recalled. In Iraq, that meant one of two targets – a seat of Shia power
or, even better, a defining religious symbol. In February 2006, and
again two months later, Zarqawi’s bombers destroyed the Imam al-Askari
shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad. The sectarian war was fully ignited
and Zarqawi’s ambitions realised.
Asked about the merits of this violent provocation, Abu Ahmed paused for the first time in our many conversations.
“There was a reason for opening this war,” he said.
“It
was not because they are Shia, but because the Shia were pushing for
it. The American army was facilitating the takeover of Iraq and giving
the country to them. They were in cooperation with each other.”
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| Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006 when he was the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. — Photo by AP |
He then reflected on the man who gave the orders.
“Zarqawi was
very smart. He was the best strategist that the Islamic State has had.
Abu Omar [al-Baghdadi] was ruthless,” Abu Ahmed said, referring to
Zarqawi’s successor, who was killed in a US-led raid in April 2010.
“And Abu Bakr is the most bloodthirsty of all.
“After
Zarqawi was killed, the people who liked killing even more than him
became very important in the organisation. Their understanding of sharia
and of humanity was very cheap. They don’t understand the Tawheed (the
Qur’anic concept of God’s oneness) the way it was meant to be
understood. The Tawheed should not have been forced by war.”
Despite
reservations that were already starting to stir, by 2006, Abu Ahmed had
become part of a killing machine that would operate at full speed for
much of the following two years. Millions of citizens were displaced,
neighbourhoods were cleansed along sectarian lines, and an entire
population numbed by unchecked brutality.
That summer, the US
finally caught up with Zarqawi, with the help of Jordanian intelligence,
killing him in an airstrike north of Baghdad. From late 2006, the
organisation was on the back foot – hampered by a tribal revolt that
uprooted its leadership from Anbar and shrank its presence elsewhere in
Iraq.
But according to Abu Ahmed, the group used the opportunity
to evolve, revealing a pragmatism in addition to its hardline ideology.
For Isis, the relatively quiet years between 2008 and 2011 represented a
lull, not a defeat.
By this time, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had risen
steadily through the group to become a trusted aide to its leader, Abu
Omar al-Baghdadi, and his deputy, the Egyptian jihadist Abu Ayub
al-Masri. It was at this point, Abu Ahmed said, that Isis made an
approach to the Ba’athist remnants of the old regime – ideological
opponents who shared a common enemy in the US and the Shia-led
government it backed.
Earlier incarnations of Isis had dabbled
with the Ba’athists, who lost everything when Saddam was ousted, under
the same premise that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. But by early
2008, Abu Ahmed and other sources said, these meetings had become far
more frequent – and many of them were taking place in Syria.
Syria’s
links to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq had been regularly raised by US
officials in Baghdad and by the Iraqi government. Both were convinced
that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, allowed jihadists to fly
into Damascus airport, where military officials would escort them to the
border with Iraq. “All the foreigners I knew got into Iraq that way,”
Abu Ahmed told me.
“It was no secret.”
* * *
From 2008, when the US began to negotiate the transition of its
powers to Iraq’s feeble security institutions – and therefore pave the
way to its own exit – the Americans increasingly turned to only a few
trusted figures in the Iraqi government. One of them was Major General
Hussein Ali Kamal, the director of intelligence in the country’s
Interior Ministry. A secular Kurd who had the trust of the Shia
establishment, one of Kamal’s many duties was to secure Baghdad against
terror attacks.
Like the Americans, General Kamal was convinced
that Syria was destabilising Iraq, an assessment based on the
interrogations of jihadists who had been captured by his troops.
Throughout
2009, in a series of interviews, Kamal laid out his evidence, using
maps that plotted the routes used by jihadists to cross the border into
western Iraq, and confessions that linked their journeys to specific
mid-ranking officers in Syrian military intelligence.
Seventeen of the 25 most important Islamic State leaders now running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in US prisons
As Isis activity ebbed in Iraq, he had become increasingly
obsessed with two meetings that had taken place in Syria early in 2009,
which brought together Iraqi jihadists, Syrian officials and Ba’athists
from both countries.
(Kamal, who was diagnosed with a rare cancer
in 2012, died earlier this year, and authorised me to publish details
of our conversations. “Just tell the truth,” he said during our last
interview in June 2014.)
When I first met him in 2009, he was
poring over transcripts of recordings that had been made at two secret
meetings in Zabadani, near Damascus, in the spring of that year. The
attendees included senior Iraqi Ba’athists who had taken refuge in
Damascus since their patron Saddam was ousted, Syrian military
intelligence officers, and senior figures in what was then known as Al
Qaeda in Iraq. The Syrians had developed links to the jihadists since
the earliest days of the anti-US insurgency and had used them to
unsettle the Americans and their plans for Iraq.
“By early in
2004/05, Islamic elements, jihadists and disenfranchised Ba’athists were
starting to get together,” said Ali Khedery, the former adviser to
American ambassadors and senior commanders in Bagdhad.
“They were
naturally disciplined, well organised people who knew the lay of the
land. And over time, some folks who were Ba’athists became more and more
Islamist and the insurgency raged. By 2007, General [David] Petraeus
was saying there was crystal clear intelligence of cooperation between
Syrian military intelligence and the jihadists. Though the motivations
never really aligned 100%.”
In our conversations, Abu Ahmed
emphasised the Syrian connection to Iraq’s insurgency. “The mujahideen
all came through Syria,” he said.
“I worked with many of them.
Those in Bucca had flown to Damascus. A very small number had made it
from Turkey, or Iran. But most came to Iraq with the help of the
Syrians.”
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| The Islamic State extremist group gets its funding through oil, donations from wealthy people, and extortion. — Photo by AP |
The supply line was viewed by Iraqi officials as an existential
threat to Iraq’s government and was the main source of the poisonous
relationship between Nouri al-Maliki, then Iraq’s prime minister, and
Bashar al-Assad. Maliki had become convinced early in the civil war that
Assad was trying to undermine his regime as a way to embarrass the
Americans, and the evidence he saw in 2009 from the meeting in Damascus
took his loathing of the Syrian leader to a whole new level.
“We had a source in the room wearing a wire,” at the meeting in Zabadani, General Kamal told me at the time.
“He
is the most sensitive source we have ever had. As far as we know, this
is the first time there has been a strategic level meeting between all
of these groups. It marks a new point in history.”
The
Ba’athists present led the meeting. Their aim, according to General
Kamal’s source, was to launch a series of spectacular attacks in Baghdad
and thereby undermine Maliki’s Shia-majority government, which had for
the first time begun to assert some order in post-civil war Iraq.
Until then, Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Ba’athists had been
fierce ideological enemies, but the rising power of the Shias – and
their backers in Iran – brought them together to plan a major strike on
the capital.
By July 2009, the Interior Ministry had increased
security at all checkpoints across the Tigris river into Baghdad, making
a commute at any time of day even more insufferable than normal. And
then General Kamal received a message from his source in Syria.
The
extra security at the bridges had been spotted by the attack plotters,
he said. New targets were being chosen, but he didn’t know what they
were, or when they would be hit. For the next two weeks, Kamal worked
well into the evening in his fortified office in the southern suburb of
Arasat, before being sped by armoured convoy across the July 14 Bridge –
which had been a target only days earlier – to his home inside the
Green Zone.
For the rest of the month, General Kamal spent several
hours each scorching night sweating it out on a treadmill, hoping that
the exercise would clear his head and get him ahead of the attackers.
“I
may be losing weight, but I’m not finding the terrorists,” he told me
during our last conversation before the attackers finally struck.
“I know they’re planning something big.”
On the morning of 19 August, the first of three flat-bed
trucks carrying three large 1000-litre water tanks, each filled with
explosives, detonated on an overpass outside the Finance Ministry in
south-eastern Baghdad.
The blast sent a rumble across the Emerald
City, raising desert soil that caked homes brown, and sending thousands
of pigeons scattering through the sky. Three minutes later, a second
enormous bomb blew up outside the Foreign Ministry on the northern edge
of the Green Zone. Shortly after that, a third blast hit a police convoy
near the Finance Ministry. More than 101 people were killed and nearly
600 wounded; it was one of the deadliest attacks in the six-year-old
Iraqi insurgency.
“I failed,” Kamal told me that day. “We all failed.”
Within hours, he was summoned to meet Maliki and his security chiefs. The prime minister was livid.
“He told me to present what I had to the Syrians,” Kamal later said.
“We
arranged with Turkey to act as a mediator and I flew to Ankara to meet
with them. I took this file” – he tapped a thick white folder on his
desk – “and they could not argue with what we showed them. The case was
completely solid and the Syrians knew it. Ali Mamlouk [the head of
Syrian general security] was there. All he did was look at me smiling
and say ‘I will not recognise any official from a country that is under
US occupation’. It was a waste of time.”
Iraq recalled its
ambassador to Damascus, and Syria ordered its envoy to Baghdad home in
retaliation. Throughout the rest of the year, and into early 2010,
relations between Maliki and Assad remained toxic.
In March 2010,
Iraqi forces, acting on a US tip, arrested an Islamic State leader named
Munaf Abdul Rahim al-Rawi, who was revealed to be one of the group’s
main commanders in Baghdad, and one of the very few people who had
access to the group’s then leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Al-Rawi talked.
And in a rare moment of collaboration, Iraq’s three main
intelligence bodies, including General Kamal’s Intelligence Division,
conspired to get a listening device and GPS location tracker in a flower
box delivered to Abu Omar’s hideout.
After it was confirmed that
Abu Omar and his deputy, Abu Ayub al-Masri, were present at a house six
miles south-west of Tikrit, it was attacked in a US-led raid. Both men
detonated suicide vests to avoid being captured. Messages to Osama bin
Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were found on a computer inside the house.
Much
like Bin Laden’s safe house in Pakistan, where he would be killed a
little more than a year later, Abu Omar’s hideout had no internet
connections or telephone lines – all important messages were carried in
and out by only three men. One of them was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
“Abu Bakr was a messenger for Abu Omar,” Abu Ahmed told me.
“He
became the closest aide to him. The messages that got to Osama bin
Laden were sometimes drafted by him and their journey always started
with him. When Abu Omar was killed, Abu Bakr was made leader. That time
we all had in Bucca became very important again.”
The deaths of
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri were a serious blow to Isis,
but the roles they had vacated were quickly filled by the alumni of Camp
Bucca – whose upper echelons had begun preparing for this moment since
their time behind the wire of their jail in southern Iraq.
“For
us it was an academy,” Abu Ahmed said, “but for them” – the senior
leaders – “it was a management school. There wasn’t a void at all,
because so many people had been mentored in prison.
“When [the
civil war in] Syria became serious,” he continued, “it wasn’t difficult
to transfer all that expertise to a different battle zone. The Iraqis
are the most important people on the military and Shura councils in Isis
now, and that is because of all of those years preparing for such an
event. I underestimated Baghdadi. And America underestimated the role it
played in making him what he is.”
* * *
Abu Ahmed remains a member of Isis; he is active in the
group’s operations in both Iraq and Syria. Throughout our discussions,
he portrayed himself as a man reluctant to stay with the group, and yet
unwilling to risk any attempt to leave.
Life with Isis means
power, money, wives and status – all attractive lures for young
firebrands with a cause - but it also means killing and dominating for a
worldview in which he no longer believes so fervently. He said hundreds
of young men like him, who were drawn to a Sunni jihad after the US
invasion, do not believe that the latest manifestation of the
decade-long war remains true to its origins.
“The
biggest mistake I made is to join them,” Abu Ahmed said, but added that
leaving the group would mean that he and his family would certainly be
killed.
Staying and enforcing the group’s brutal vision, despite
partially disavowing it, does not trouble Abu Ahmed, who sees himself as
having few other options.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in Jihad,” he said.
“I do,” he continued, his voice trailing away.
“But what options do I have? If I leave, I am dead.”
The
arc of his involvement with what is now the world’s most menacing
terrorist group mirrors many others who now hold senior positions in the
group: first a battle against an invading army, then a score to be
settled with an ancient sectarian foe, and now, a war that could be
acting out an end of days prophecy.
In the world of the Bucca
alumni, there is little room for revisionism, or reflection. Abu Ahmed
seems to feel himself swept along by events that are now far bigger than
him, or anyone else.
“There are others who are not ideologues,” he said, referring to senior Isis members close to Baghdadi.
“People
who started out in Bucca, like me. And then it got bigger than any of
us. This can’t be stopped now. This is out of the control of any man.
Not Baghdadi, or anyone else in his circle.”
Mr
Mallah, 30, from Westmead in Sydney was jailed in maximum security for
two years before being acquitted of terrorism charges. Just four hours
into the Sydney siege counter terrorism police also asked him for an
ISIS flag to help with their investigations. 
‘What
I think I have have learned from his conversations on Twitter with me
and others is that he is an Australian called Jake who used to live in
Melbourne. He’s already tried to make contact on Twitter with a friend
of his at the Hume Islam Youth Centre (HIYC) in Melbourne.
The HIYC is based in Motto Drive Coolaroo, Victoria, but no one could be contacted for a response.
